Night Light
by AmberPalette
Summary: The reborn Val has troubling dreams of being Valgaav. Filia is wounded and rendered invalid for many months. Xelloss defies the remaining dragon elders and steps in to assume a startlingly skillful paternal role. Can he help Val?
1. Prologue

**Night Light **

**A Slayers Fanfiction**

**By Amber S./ "AmberPalette"**

**Prologue **

**(Five years after the end of "The Slayers TRY")**

It is late and dark and quiet in the Outerworld. In this farthest region of the farthest corner of the Red World, a cobblestone path meanders down to a cottage. The residence rests at the edge of a fishing village. It is a humble dwelling. Yet a floral forest cocoons this home. Lavender, roses, hydrangea, lilies, daffodils, pansies, peonies, ferns, and an ocean of ivy crawl up the cottage and its nearby pottery barn and kiln, rendering the walls themselves teemingly alive. This verdant house lies facing a field of tall grass that leads to the sea.

A single light glows in a single bedroom window, on the second floor. Two voices, one sly and raspy and male, one indignant and clear and female, harmonize just above the hum of the breeze.

It is a kind of spoken lullaby to their child, a little boy of four or five.

The child knows it.

For Val is used to the sound of his adoptive mother teasing or softly quibbling with her long-time boyfriend. That boyfriend is a shadowy, enigmatic person who takes human form but who claims to be a thing called a "mazoku." A thing that eats bad feelings and lives in shadows. But Val just knows this creature as his favorite playmate, and the person most integral to his daily life next to his mother.

And so, to Val, their two voices are the most comforting and consistent sound in the world: that of his mother, and the man he longs to call his father.

Their banter slows to the occasional playful snip.

Gradually they both turn to Val and tuck him in.

Mom calls dad a moron. Or, if in a particularly foul humor, mom calls dad "rotting garbage."

Dad calls mom "predictable" while dimming Val's lights.

Mom glares while fluffing Val's pillows.

Dad giggles in a slightly off-kilter way, and does something like tickling mom under the arms or kissing her on the nose, or calling her hair "fresh daffodil blossoms."

Mom blushes and forgives dad for saying something irritating or rude a few minutes earlier.

Dad pulls Val's covers up over him, halfway up, just as Val likes it. Dad grins at Val.

Dad usually keeps his eyes closed, for some reason.

But when Val looks at dad the way he is looking at him right now, dad always opens his eyes and looks directly into Val. Not at him—INTO him. Dad has eyes like a cat's, with slit diamond pupils. His irises are a hot, pale purple. Val thinks dad's eyes are neat. "She's not really mad at me," dad reassures Val, ruffling Val's hair. He does not look away until Val smiles back, and nods.

Mom sings Val a lullaby. Mom is a little tone deaf on the high notes, but it's the most wonderful singing in the world, because it is sweet and pure, even when she hits a sour note. It is nurturing and it makes Val feel warm.

Sometimes, if dad has not already gone to bed, if dad is still doing things like putting away toys Val might trip and get hurt on, dad joins in singing. Dad has a voice that flirts and lilts, and winks. Dad has a voice like a person who is ancient with seeing and knowing many things. Exhausting things, and wonderful things too. A raspy, soft, arresting, dark tenor, and a little tired, like the song of a very old and very wise bird. The sound of experience and yet, for all that experience, of dedication to one person. Protectiveness of one person. Protectiveness of Val.

Oh, Val wishes he could call this man dad, for real.

Well….maybe he'll ask. Maybe soon.

Tonight is like many nights that Val can recollect.

Mom kisses Val on each cheek, twice, on each eyelid, once, and on the nose, once. It is custom. Val's toes curl, his ears droop, and he smiles sleepily up at mom.

Ordinarily, dad has already left the room by now.

But on some nights, as tonight, dad also kisses Val goodnight—once, on the forehead.

Val jolts from his sleepy trance. No. He really hates this.

A feeling like his stomach is sinking into his intestines. Being left behind. Val remembers his biological parents in dreams. He remembers how they died. Falling from the sky that was jeweled with black and gold. Long sharp things through their ebony scaled and feathered stomachs. A stomach dropping into intestines. Lots of red.

Pain tastes like red cinnamon sticks…Val remembers… it's a good dessert…

No. Val hates this. Dad is the one who understands why pain tastes like cinnamon sticks. Dad is a mazoku. Dad is the one Val tells…dad is the one that doesn't get scared or uncomfortable when Val says this stuff. Dad eats pain too. Who can Val tell when he dreams about pain and cinnamon sticks and red and guilt?

Fear tastes like almonds. It fills you up fast. Val remembers. Val won't eat almonds anymore.

"You're leaving in the morning," he murmurs, resentfully, at dad's back. "You're leaving me."

Mom gasps. Both mom and dad stop midstep and turn.

Dad looks, for the first time in Val's recollection, troubled. Rustled. Caught in the act. "How did you know that, Val?" he asks, mustering gentle amusement. He is smiling—but Val knows that doesn't really mean much. Dad always smiles, no matter what he is feeling. Val looks to dad's eyes when dad tries to deflect and deceive with that stupid smile. Val sees strain and concern in the purple cat eyes. Good. Dad deserves to worry, if he's going to leave Val behind. Dad deserves to hurt if he leaves Val behind!

Val loves dad. He misses him.

Hurt tastes like lime juice. Loneliness tastes like peppermint. Val remembers.

Mom has her hand on dad's arm. She looks terribly torn.

"You always kiss me goodnight when you leave the next day." Val glares mutinously at his dragon-covered quilt pillows. He feels like crying. His face is hot.

"I do, don't I?" Dad doesn't argue or belittle. Dad never talks down to Val. This makes dad very hard to understand sometimes, but Val would rather ask lots of questions than be talked down to. After all, dad always answers every question that Val asks.

Mom is the same way.

Val loves mom and dad for that.

But right now, Val is so mad at dad. So mad.

Anger tastes like meat that's been charcoal-broiled too long. Val remembers.

"You'll be gone before I even get up. I hate that. I hate that stupid Zelas woman. She makes you leave me. All the time. Mommy cries. I hate that."

Peppermint and a touch of almonds. And lots of charcoal.

Dad sighs, hands on hips. He takes a pensive stance, gazing at the floor. His legs in his green silk pajamas with XM embroidered on the breast pocket swish apart. He looks ready to do verbal battle. But then he glides over to Val.

Dad always looks so confident and graceful when he walks. He reminds Val of a panther on a high tree branch, or a wolf on a rocky ledge. It always looks perfect when he walks next to mom, because mom stomps around so fiercely. They look right together, they're so different.

More peppermint. Val hates candy canes. At Christmas, he never eats a single one.

Dad squats on his knees next to Val's head. "What if I kissed you goodnight every night? Would you like it better then?"

Val shrugs. His vision is blurry and his cheeks feel wet.

"Val, I leave because I have to. Because if I don't do my job, I won't be allowed to see you and your mom anymore. Normally, someone like me isn't allowed to be friends with people like dragons. Heh. Actually, most dragons don't like me at all."

Val always gets the feeling, when dad says stuff like this, that there are many things dad has done and seen that Val has never been told. Some of those things might even be a little scary and bad, but Val knows dad is protecting him from those things right now.

Dad keeps talking. Dad has a funny voice, it's nasal and husky. It always makes Val feel better, though, for some reason. "Try to see it logically. Isn't it better for me to go away a little while than forever?"

"I just miss you," Val squeezes out through trembling lips and clenched teeth. "Last time I had a nightmare about the big bad bogey lady with red hair under my bed, you went and got me warm milk and stuff. And you chased her off with a flashlight. What am I gonna do if she comes back tomorrow night and you aren't here?"

"I know, buddy, I know." Dad turns to mom then. "Could we have a minute?"

Mom purses her lips, but she nods. She steps out of the room reluctantly, but leaves the door open.

Dad opens a palm. A little pulsing red light glows, and grows. It becomes a soft coral colored orb of light. "Nothing in the whoooole universe," dad explains quietly, wriggling his fingers to nurture forth the twinkling magic, "scares off red-headed sorceresses who eat too much and swear a lot and cast Dragon Slaves, better than a night light."

Val is transfixed. "Really?"

"Yep." Dad bends down under the bed and places the night light there. "So now, whenever I have to go away for a few days, you can use your night light to scare off the bogey lady."

Val waits for dad to come back up from under the bed before he leaps up and hugs dad around the neck. Dad has cobwebs and dust bunnies in his silky purple hair from the space under the bed. Val doesn't care. "Come back. Please?"

"Always."

"Xellos," Val croaks dad's name, because he is afraid to call him dad just yet.

"Yeah?"

"Are you ever gonna leave mom and me forever?"

"No." The reply is instantaneous.

"Why not? How do I know?"

"I dunno. I guess I just don't feel like doing that to you. I don't like to do things unless I feel like doing them. I do what I want to do. And I don't want to hurt you."

"You mean you love me."

Dad doesn't say anything. He looks like something is choking him back from replying, like a chain collar. But he nods. Emphatically, and twice. His eyes are calm and Val feels like they are trustworthy.

Saying "love" feels like peeling off skin like you peel off a bandaid, with a sharp knife. If you are someone who knows how anger and fear, pain and loneliness and hurt, taste, saying that word is excruciating. It is forbidden. Val remembers.

Then dad sees how Val's face crumples with troubling thoughts, and so he adds, wryly, "Anyway, I am certain that if I did leave forever, your mother would chase me down and castrate me with a rusty spork. "

There is a bubbly, abrupt giggle from just outside Val's bedroom door. It's mom.

Val blinks. "What's castrate? Why's mommy laughing?"

Dad averts his eyes and clears his throat. "Time to go to sleep, Val."

"Nuh uh! What IS it?"

"Good-NIGHT, Val."

"Awww, man."

Dad chuckles throatily. "Some other time. When you're older." He hovers up over Val's bed, parallel to it, arms folded. "I'll stay right here till you're asleep."

"Promise?"

"Promise." Dad winks.

"Kay." Val rolls over on his side, towards the coral glow of his night light. His sleepy smile returns. The warmth of dad's body hovering a few feet over him, standing guard, is like a thermal blanket.

Val is asleep before mom comes back into his bedroom. He does not see how mom and dad kiss and hug and cling to each other, while mom laughs and cries at the same time into dad's shoulder, while dad whispers "shh" and calls mom's tears precious and kisses each one, and tells her to store them up and save them, and not shed so many. He does not hear dad telling mom that he meant what he said to Val.

He does not hear mom say that if anything happened to her, it is dad that she would want to take care of Val.

But that day is coming.


	2. Judgments

**Night Light**

A Slayers Fanfiction by Amber S. ("AmberPalette")

**Chapter 1: Judgments**

Milgasia will never forget that day, or that person.

That monster.

It was one thousand and twelve years ago when the sky rained red with the blood of Milgasia's people, all because of a single person.

One remembers strange things from such monumental tragedies. Not poetic, universal, theatrical things, no. More things like how one's cotton shirt clung to one's anxiously sweating skin and itched. Or how the blood smelled potent, rusty. What one had eaten for breakfast only hours earlier—tepid eggs over thick firebaked rye bread. An oddly unappetizing breakfast, lingering too long and too heavy in the belly, ominous of the horrors of the afternoon to come.

But Milgasia is tormented more than one usually is by the memory. He remembers more powerful things than his breakfast, than the smells or feels of the weird peripheral details. He remembers the entire ordeal.

And his brain rivets around its perpetrator. As do the tortured thoughts of his remaining colleagues, the fellow golden dragon elders. There are few denizens of the astral plane that they loathe more than this single person.

This single monster. This venus fly trap with the appearance of an iris—a vibrant yet gentle purple, a blossom softly beckoning its victims with a fruity, homecoming scent, like earth after a summer rain. This alluring, charming, deadly mazoku general.

Milgasia had been a teenage hatchling, the human equivalent of sixteen years old, when he was drawn into the War of the Monsters' Fall—the Koma War.

And that was when he witnessed the most infamous act of this person whom he will forever hate.

Not Hellmaster Fibrizo. Not Chaos Dragon Gaav. Neither perpetrator of the war.

No, someone else entirely: a child of Greater Beast Zelas Metallium.

A battle for seizure of the northernmost Temple of shinzoku Flarelord Ceiphied, greatest foe of mazoku lord Ruby-Eyed Shabranigdo, had begun around three o'clock the previous morning, and had not ceased.

Milgasia couldn't tell the difference in time anyway, as the charred and smoking sky, and the very bodies of monsters and dragons in flight and struggle, had long blocked the sun.

The battle had ebbed suspiciously near the temple itself. The dragon elders suspected a diversion. They had spotted the Beastmaster herself, in the form of a grizzly black winged wolf, conversing with her subordinates on the battlefield around noon, before vanishing.

After that, the monster race's ranks had retreated from the meat of the battle, though in bizzarely exultant spirits.

Something was definitely up.

Milgasia had strayed from the frontline, forehead dribbling blood from a demon's cutlass wound, to scout for a special demon agent's stealth attack—hoping to catch the culprit and please his elders. Milgasia had been reckless and ambitious in his youth.

Not a trace of life, friend or antagonist, was visible within 100 feet of the temple. Milgasia leaned against a rock outcropping and drank deeply of a water gourd, summoning strength to return to the battle.

It was then that Milgasia first saw him.

In the sky.

Like an angel of death.

A man—he couldn't have looked over 25 years old, and he appeared to be human—was flying at an incomprehensible speed towards the temple. He was dressed in a plain black cloak, trimmed in red and yellow Greek meander, and a hermit-priest's baggy traveling attire. His only weapon was an almost comical, gnarly wooden staff with a red orb at its tip.

He had the hair of an Egyptian boy-priest, flecked all the imaginable hues of purple—violet, ruby, magenta, burgundy, amethyst, lavender, royal blue. He moved ever forward, propulsed by a savage grace, an impossible and deadly beauty, like a slick black panther. He streaked through the sky towards his destination, the Fire Dragon King temple, as a sleek sharp scythe might slice through blades of dry indigo-colored grass. He exuded confidence and unconcern. A perverse optimism, a bliss saturated with both hope and bloodlust, gleamed in his hypnotizing, long-lashed cat eyes—they were so stunning that Milgasia could see them even at a distance—and propelled him to still higher velocities. His movements were effortless, even in their viciousness. He was jubilant.

Clearly this was no human man. This was another demon. And clearly this was his very first mission out of the womb of Zelas Metallium.

He was breathtaking—a lethal purple lark.

Milgasia is still ashamed of himself for his first impulse towards that creature—not revulsion, but a shuddering, almost tearful awe. He feels disgust that, at that moment, he was seized by some unholy joy, some kind of excruciating pleasure, at simply watching the movements of that exquisite warrior. He was transfixed into nonaction.

To his horror, some deep recess of his teenage self actually wished for this foe's victory.

Then a large, livid male ryuzoku from the distant battle line turned sharply and corralled the purple-haired youth against a small patch of floating land. The golden dragon spread wide its glistening white jowls and roared right in the beautiful boy's face.

And the boy…

Smiled.

So very serenely. So pleasantly. As if the dragon had beckoned him to high tea.

A halo of ruby-crimson pulsated out from the boy-mazoku's pores.

His smile became a sneer of staggering malice. His eyes, which had fallen closed as if to withdraw, to compose and refuel, now snapped open.

They were so gorgeous that to look at them was agony. They were toxic.

The boy-mazoku's sneer sprouted bottomless scorn. And then he began to dissolve into something that in no way resembled a human. Something black, and oozy, swirling, and covered in piercing sharp, mobile spikes.

Milgasia knew, even before the transformation began—the moment those painful eyes opened—to be terrified and repulsed. "RUN!" he tried to scream, but his throat was dry, closed, with an indescribable and sudden despair. An unnatural despair from without, which choked him. It must have been coming from that agonizingly beautiful boy-demon.

And the black vortex released its stranglehold on the stupefied adult dragon. It became that beautiful pseudo-human again. The mazoku ducked, turned his staff parallel to the turf, and in one fluid gesture, impaled the dragon through the neck. He drove straight to the nape, in the back, where the nerve sack, the human equivalent of the jugular, was located.

"NO!" Milgasia tried to shriek. Nothing came.

And then the beautiful monster began to giggle. It was obscenely beautiful, playful almost, and Milgasia felt that he had been damned to hell just for listening to it. The laugh abruptly stopped, but it initiated a rhythmic, almost choreographed dance, in and out, of the dragon's neck.

The great topaz-hued creature was so stunned that it didn't even cry out as it plummeted to its death.

The mazoku just kept smiling. He sighed, and shook his head. Milgasia thought, though he might be going mad by now, that he heard the demon tsk down at the falling beast.

Then the monster closed his lethal eyes and cocked his head, curiously, at a sizeable flock of golden dragons approaching him from the north to aid their fallen brother. "Oh," the hunter chirped. Milgasia jumped as though struck by lightning. He had never imagined the creature's voice to sound so human, so ordinary. But it did.

The demon set aside his staff. Obviously he was preparing to accomplish a task he had thought would be far less convenient and easy to complete.

And Milgasia simply knew what was coming. He just knew. This single creature was what had caused such rejoicing among the monster race's ranks earlier that day. "NO! No, PLEASE!" Finally he was able to scream, as the overpowering presence of gloom brought by the creature was diffused by its distraction.

But the potency of despair returned as the mazoku glanced over his shoulder at the young dragon. His eyes again opened. Milgasia staggered and fell halfway to him, as though the monster's very glance were an injection of venom. He was humiliated by his weakness. But the air itself was ripe with the creature's bloodlust. "I beg of you…please do not see this evil through…"

"Ah. This won't do." The demon's impossibly beautiful face, now, was unreadable. "Greetings, dragonling. What is your name?" His voice—it was husky, nasal, tremblingly deep, and yet buoyant, flirtatious—all at once. ALL AT ONCE!

And it was absurdly polite. There was still dragon blood dripping red from the staff he held. He blinked, and then opened his eyes wider. They burned violet-ruby, drawing Milgasia nearer, like a moth to a flame.

No resisting, there was no resisting comprehensible, despite the humiliation that grew. The young dragon felt somehow that he was being unclothed and publicly flogged, simply by his consent to a conversation with this awful creature—this monster of unequivocable beauty.

"Milgasia," he heard himself spill out, his eyes overflowing.

The beautiful monster's nostrils curled. "Do not weep, Milgasia. Stop."

"MY PEOPLE ARE DYING!" the young dragon raged, face on fire. "YOU are killing them! How DARE you command me not to cry!"

"It must be done, Milgasia. I am ordered to do it. Do not weep for what you cannot change or it will drive you mad." The monster pointed to the flock of dragons approaching. His eyes now lacked their harshness. They even seemed to carry pity now. Sorrow.

Milgasia was again paralyzed by the abruptly conflicted nature of this weird and exquisite warrior. "Why?" he croaked.

"That is a secret." Then the creature turned his back to the dragon, and casually raised his index finger.

"WAIT!" Milgasia cried. "At least tell me the name of my people's killer!"

The hunter uttered his name in a voice devoid of melodramatic embellishment—businesslike, almost curt. "Xellos Metallium."

And then, languidly, the beautiful monster waved his finger.

That was all. _He waved his finger_.

There came the distant sound of eruption, like thunder.

Milgasia still hates thunderstorms, to this day.

At that moment, he looked to the sky, frozen, riveted.

The cobalt curtain was torn asunder, from side to side, in a fiery vulva of red.

Bodies were falling everywhere around him—bodies missing limbs heads, tails, bloody stumps, a rain of red, and indiscriminate explosions, shrieks, and wails.

Milgasia crumpled into a fetal ball on the ground, certain that he was in hell.

Two strong, cold hands seized him under his arms and hoisted him to his feet as if he were a toddler. He stared, forgetting to breathe, into the eyes of the murderer, that thing called Xellos.

Devastating beauty. There was no other way to describe those eyes.

"Don't be foolish," the mazoku spat. The face framing those eyes was so irate suddenly that it was terrifying. "Go—live." He shoved the adolescent dragon away from him. "Before I change my mind, stupid hatchling! I don't like doing the unnecessary!"

There was something deeper and more complicated than Milgasia might have ever imagined, after that act of senseless killing, in Xellos's expression. It haunted the dragon.

Too shocked to object, Milgasia took flight and never looked back.

But the name and the creature he had just encountered—never would he forget it.

Xellos Metallium had no business handling dragon children. It did not matter that he spared Milgasia as a child.

NO! One erratic spat of mercy did not matter!

And Xellos Metallium STILL has no business handling dragon children.

Bazard Ul Copt's only daughter must be insane.

She must…

…Or does she see something Milgasia doesn't see?

In one thousand twelve years, what exactly changes, and what stays the same?

"XELLOS!" a shrill female voice emanates from the cottage at the edge of the Outerworld village, piercing the twilight air.

A dainty booted foot stomps a cool stone floor. Kaolin dust rises dramatically around the pink-clad woman pitching the tantrum. A long dandelion-yellow tail snakes out from under her many-layered skirts.

"XELLOS, YOU FIX THIS LEAK THAT YOU MADE HORSING AROUND WITH VAL THIS INSTANT!"

As though scripted for maximal slapstick effect, at that moment, a dripping crack in the clay sewer piping in the ceiling of the ceramics room becomes a geyser, hitting the woman squarely in the face.

Absolutely hysterical, certifiably crazy giggling is the only retort to her chiding.

The woman struggles against the stream, flailing her arms, the antithesis of control and sangfroid. "IT'S NOT FUNNY, XELLOS!"

"HAAAA-hahaha! Filly, honey…" And a beautiful purple haired man, hovering in the air above the watery cacophony, drifts down to the ground. No creature who is so irritating should be allowed to be as breathtaking as he is. So breathtaking that it almost burns to look at him for longer than a moment. Like a purple flame.

"Don't call me FILLY when I'm MAD at you, you STUPID MAZOKU!" The woman is aesthetically stunning herself, though her often flustered, self-conscious bearing proves that she is unaware of her own beauty. She is a tall, sturdy, curvaceous creature—her face a perfectly crafted oval, her eyes a wide cornflower hue flecked in gold, her skin a soft creamy pale peach flesh, her hair an endless cascade of honey, platinum, and canary yellow, depending on the light shimmering off the follicles.

The man is keenly aware of his longtime girlfriend's beauty. It shows in the hungry way he approaches her now, sliding a lean, firm arm around her wet waist. Her adorable, childish ranting rolls off his back as water off a mallard's feathers.

In fact, for some innocently twisted reason, he finds her constant outrage at his shenanigans to be insatiably sexy.

"I was just teaching Val the fireball spell, FILIA, sweetheart. I neglected to teach him aim at the same time." His voice is a nasal lilt. Despite the almost grating quality, it is a strangely seductive, cajoling voice.

Then Xellos smiles so broadly that his pearly lupine fangs show.

The word "MINE" seems to be etched across his face as he gazes possessively, adoringly, down at Filia. He pulls her against him, and they are both soaking wet under the stream of well-water. He presses his torso into hers and crevices and protrusions fit as though the two are matching pieces of a flawless puzzle. He makes a happy growling sound, shifting around a bit. "I've missed you a lot this week, my dragoness, my Filia Ul Copt. A LOT."

Filia's heart does somersaults that would chagrin an Olympic athlete. "Fix the leak."

Xellos's heavy, smoky expression of longing lifts, and becomes more than a little devilish. "Never."

Oh, that smile.

"XELLOS!"

And he smells good too. Really really good. Like pumpkin pie. And caramel. And gardenias. And some heavy musky spice. She hates him for being so damned luscious. It only gets ten times stronger when he's wet.

"Ahaha. Nope. How will I be needed in the future if you don't have things for me to do that I haven't done yet?"

"I love you more than my own life, and you worry about me NEEDING you?" She strokes his firm, trim jaw.

For a moment Xellos looks taken aback, even a little awkward, in a pleased way. "Oh, alright." Then he changes the subject, an evasive Peter Pan. "Val really does well at this age, you know, at black magic. That was one doozey of a fireball, I must say. I'll be having him pillaging rare shrines and robbing graves of odd relics in no time." Hastily he holds up his hands to her enraged face. "KID-ding."

"Don't you ever joke about that. I NEVER want that horrible she-wolf creature you call your mother enlisting my son…"  
"Filia." Suddenly Xellos's flawless face is marred with a dark, and intensely serious, glare. His voice remains calm and steady, but there is an undercurrent of ferocity to it. "You know damned well that I have _always_ moved heaven and hell to keep our son safe from the Beastmaster's interested eye. What I am is not a path meant for everyone—certainly not our child. I will hide him from it, with all of me. You KNOW that."

"…That is the first time that you said 'our' child, and not 'your' child." The dragoness stares transfixed into her lover's cat eyes, which have heated from amethyst to crimson in less than three seconds.

Xellos's face reveals nothing in return. "Yes, I did," he retorts matter-of-factly, and leaves it at that.

Filia knows what Xellos means. She is used to his obtuse, enigmatic way of talking. Her eyes shine even as the well-water further soddens them.

"However…a little dabbling in dark arts never hurt a kid…" His gaze becomes crafty again.

"YOU SHUT UP! I'm not turning my son into some perverse shaman like that demi-golem Zelgadiss, either!" But Filia Ul Copt's heart is only half in her scold, and it's obvious by the indulgent flush on her cheeks. She is too joyful at her boyfriend's obvious devotion to her child—and no one is more important to her than that child, Val. No one is more important to her than that child to whom she hopes to atone, for the atrocities that her race, the golden dragons, cast against his, the ancient dragons.

No one is more important to her than Val.

No one.

Then Xellos's teasing fully registers. "A FIREball? Well, that would explain the CHAR MARKS. Which YOU WILL CLEAN!"

Her demon lover seems to have relaxed his iron pledge grasp on her. He is easy and cajoling again. "Filia, honey, I'm not deaf, there's no need to see if you can break the known decibel barrier…" Xellos licks his lips and tries not to laugh again, at Filia's predictable glower. "I wonder if there is raw sewage in this water….hey, you could call it 'namagomi.' Ahaha. I wonder if I have distant third and fourth cousins floating about in there…"

"FIX THE PIPE!"

"Yes, sir." The mazoku smirks, feigning extreme contrition. He mimics a mad scientist's whiplashed assistant, crouching his imaginary hunchback forward and ambling towards the pipe. "You know, this would be easier to do in my true form. I could split into about a dozen black spikes and weld the thing back together."

Filia shudders. "I hate it when you turn into that porcupiney black tornado thing."

Xellos cackles and turns, one eye impishly closed and the other peeping. "Porcupiney? Ahaha, Filly. Nice word, babe. I am the Porcupiney Upside-Down Cone of DOOOOOM."

"Xellos Metallium, if you ever want to share a bed with me again…"

"WOAH." Sudden and true horror. Men are men, regardless of species. "Easy, I'm on it, I said!" Xellos scowls, ever-vexed at having his hand forced, and folds over at the knees.

He snaps his fingers and his humanoid form devolves into a swirling, inky vortex. Twelve or so spikes detach rapidly from that centrifugal force and mesh themselves around the pipe. Blistering heat emanates from each black needle, and soon the flow of water stops as the clay is melted and rearranged to minimize damage.

The tornado shape billows downward next to Filia. "Satisfied?" comes a familiar voice, from the center, smug and playful.

She grins back. "It'll do."

A scoffing sound. Slowly the exquisite human form of Xellos rematerializes, standing with hip jaunted out in playful indignation. "Whatever, 'It'll do.' Like anything I do is half as—"

The sound of a dry sob, and then a whimper, behind them causes both adults to turn to the doorway.

There stands Val, in pajamas, a horrified, preylike stare fixed on Xellos alone.

The mazoku understands before the dragoness does. He realizes that Val has never seen him in his true form before. "Oh…Val, buddy…" He crouches down.

The child seems, if anything, angry now. "NO!" he snaps. He turns and runs out of the cottage, down the sea grass, towards the ocean.

Xellos sighs. "Well."

"…Well." Filia hugs herself. "I should have told you not to change over. I should have explained to him…that you don't always look so…nice. I should go to him."

"No. I will. It isn't your responsibility."

"I'm his mother."

Xellos scoffs again, almost angrily. "Well, I'M his…"

Filia turns, wildly expectant, eager, to her boyfriend. "His what?" she demands, almost breathlessly.

Xellos cringes. Some base part of him crumples, becoming cowardly, retreating to the comfort of the dark. He knows what his two beloved dragons want. He is not sure if he can, or should, give it, or continue to deny them. He is not sure what is better for them both. "…His mazoku," he finishes half-willingly. Then, to Filia's fallen face, he adds, "When he remembers his previous life, as Valgaav…I'm the one meant to explain it to him."

"Ah. Well. It looks like you have more to fix tonight than clay pipes."

"It looks like it." Xellos nods absently. His eyes are closed, retreating to their battle tents. Strategizing time. He moves to the door, out it, in a swift, fluid motion of teleportation. The sound of two pockets of air snapping together and apart, of a temperamental electrical cord, follows each teleportation. "I'll talk to him now. I promise. And I'll use my particular wraithing skills on him, to relieve him of his unhappy feelings. He should feel better soon, Filly."

"Bring him back for dinner. 15 minutes." Her voice is flooding with maternal concern.

"He'll be here."

"And you?"

"Depends on what he thinks of me by then. This is for him. I can always sleep invisibly, or on the roof, or something. Since I don't really ever sleep, except occasionally for kicks. Heh."

"Yes. Xellos. I love you. I really, really do."

The demon turns and casts a restrained but potent look at his dragoness. "I…yes," he forces through teeth that are gritted by an unspoken taboo of his race. He leans back, towards her. It is a message of reciprocity. "More than words…"

"I know what you mean," Filia croons. "Always. I know. And so will Val. He will. Someday, he will appreciate that you were always here."

"…Good." Abruptly Xellos's voice is a bouncy chirp again, his smile firm and impenetrable. He waves cavalierly at Filia, and teleports down the field to the ocean.

The monster finds the child perched on a rock outcropping overlooking the sea. Only the hum of cicadas and crickets, and the distant sloshing whisper of the ocean below punctures the silence.

In the far recesses of his mind, Xellos remembers how he felt when freshly a mazoku, how he felt when he turned and saw another dragon child leaning against a rock outcropping and judging him.

But he felt very differently toward Milgasia of the golden dragons than he feels now, a millennium later, toward Val of the ancient dragons.

For this child, and his mother, Xellos feels that one forbidden, unspoken word.

He feels this thing, this agent of selflessness and creation, towards Val and Filia with such startling force that it sometimes causes his mazoku form, crafted upon strife, negativity, destruction, and chaos, unthinkable anguish.

It takes all the restraint that Xellos Metallium has not to turn his darker side on them. Not to feed on them like the most repulsive of parasites, to ease the torturous burden of the love that he feels, the love that is so damned unnatural for one of his kind, towards the very sound of the names "Val" and "Filia."

And yet he will never use them as convenient snacks.

Never.

Never.

Never. Xellos is very good at smiling through agony. Xellos is very good at smiling through anything. And the agony is worth the bliss of their company. It really is.

And if that makes Xellos a freak of nature, well, all the better for him. He always has embraced eccentricity.

No one tells Xellos what to do. Xellos knows what he wants. And Xellos gets it.

Val does not run when Xellos, thinking on these things, takes a seat next to him on the rock.

Neither looks at the other for what feels like an eternity. Xellos is very, very patient. He coaxes Val to him through his absolute inertia.

Finally there is a nibble.

"Xellos?"

"Mmm hmm?"

"Are you good or bad?"

"No one is just good OR bad, Val."

"That's not a real answer."

"Ahaha! Heehehe. No, I guess it isn't. But it's the truest answer."

"I don't care." The child knits his tiny, chubby hands together. His short black tail coils around the adult's leg, almost unconsciously. Knowing that the adult belongs to him, somehow. "Gimme a real answer, Xellos."

"Okay." The adult smiles vaguely, softly, at the little tail wrapped around his leg. Then he opens a hand and places his palm gently on the child's back.

It lingers there a moment, then he pulls back, and begins to teach. "I am different things to different people. To you and your mother, I am good. And I always will be. To others, I am the deadliest of enemies. And I always will be. And I can live with the fact that I am inherently contradictory like that—if you can."

"What's contradictory?"

"Clashing. Opposite. Totally different. But coexisting, in my case."

"Oh, okay. So you're two people."

"Yes, sort of."

"Yeah, that's okay with me."

"I'm glad, Val."

"But I.."

"Go on. It's okay."

"I…I sorta asked my teacher about the War of the Monsters' Fall. Her uncle is a big priest of holy magic. So she knows a lot of history stuff that most humans don't know."

"Oh, yeah?"

"Yeah. She told me why people run to the other side of the classroom and whisper and stuff when you come with mom and me on parent-teacher night."

"…ah. So this isn't really just a thing of seeing me taking an alarming foreign shape."

"..Nuh uh. I just…Did you really kill all those golden dragons a… a thousand years ago…with one finger? Is Elder Milgasia really scared of you? Did you really do it?"

Xellos bends down and looks directly at Val, eyes flashing open. He does not compromise or condescend. He does not brutalize, but neither does he cushion. It would not be fair to the child. "I did it, yes. I did it. A dragon's weak spot is at the nape of its neck…"

He places his index and middle finger on the aforementioned spot of Val's fragile neck. The touch is so very light—almost ticklish.

"…Because there is a nerve bundle there—right in this area," he breathes, tracing a small circle with those two fingers. His eyes remain fixed on the child's.

Val trembles at first. But the convulsive gestures subside the longer he stares up at Xellos, and ses only patience and benevolence gazing back. Still he feels pain, and confusion. He squeaks, "You k-know how to kill me…"

"My creator and mother ordered me to kill that flock of golden dragons a millennium ago. And so I did. However--"

"Y-you know how to kill me!"

"Val. Val, listen. I do not go on killing sprees for the fun of it. I only do my job, and only then when my job is unavoidable, when I cannot bend the rules and means to better ends. Listen, child, even if I were ordered to kill you, and the only alternative option were my own death, then I would find a way…." His fingers run through Val's hair, once, caringly, moving from the spot of peril, before he pulls back his hand. "…Well…that is not something that I should discuss with someone your age, either. Know, though, that you would not be killed. I would not allow it. Don't be afraid of me."

"…But mommy's a golden dragon." The child withdraws into himself, coiling his limbs around his torso and glaring through eyes jeweled with moisture. "What if mommy had been one of those people you killed in that war?"

"She wasn't. She never would be. Never. Just because she is of that race does not mean I see her as just another ryuzoku. I am not so blind."

Val shakes his head fiercely. "I saw what you looked like. A big ugly swirly…spiky black thing. It's not real when you smile. You're fake. You're bad. That's what I think." His words tremble with ambivalence and fear. Not fear of Xellos, though. Fear of losing Xellos. Fear of losing what Xellos brings, what Xellos connotes, in the mind and heart of a boy of five, for whom that consistent adult male presence is the world.

"…ah, Val." Xellos's voice is arrestingly soft, like feathers against glass. He closes his eyes and turns away. His jaw clenches once or twice. But he does not contradict the child, or force his hand.

"Why didn't mommy tell me you did that stuff?"

"Because she wanted you to wait till you were older, and could understand that those things I did have nothing to do with how I feel about you. Being a grown-up is really mixed up sometimes. And it just gets more mixed up and complicated the longer we live. We do things when we feel other things. And we don't treat everyone the same. Some people are more important to us. And we treat them differently. We feel about them differently."

"…how DO you feel about m-me?" The boy speaks around little tear-hiccups. He rubs at his eyes awkwardly, and hunches away from Xellos, even as he scoots his hindside closer to Xellos on the ledge over the sea, where both their legs dangle.

The mighty mazoku casually conjures a handkerchief and hands it to the child. "Mmwellll. I…hmm. I feel restrained."

"What-wh-what's res-trained?" A loud hiccup follows the question.

"Here. Blow. Good boy." Xellos assists the boy, then takes back the soiled handkerchief, and continues. "Trapped. I feel trapped from doing what I want right now. Because I want to make you feel better, but I also know that you must do, and think, and feel, what is right for you. I should expect no more. Not from you or anyone. After all, I do the same thing. If I am bad in your eyes, it is not my right to change your mind. You must draw your own judgments. It's part of growing up. It is a right of passage that even mazoku recognize and respect." Then Xellos stretches out his left arm, and his red-tipped staff.

Fireflies gather at the glowing blood red orb, and then disseminate, all in Val's direction.

They encircle the child. As dusk becomes night over the water's horizon, they keep the child's pathway lit.

"Maybe you should go back in to your mother now." Xellos speaks in that same feather-soft voice. He is smiling acceptingly at the little boy's confused, wet face. "It's alright, Val. I promise."

"Y-you're not mad?"

"I respect the judgments you have passed. You formed them sincerely and with much forethought."

"I…I did?"

"Mmm hmm. You did. I am not mad at you." The mazoku waves a finger, and though his hand never touches the boy's face, Val feels something warm and gentle drying the tears from his cheeks. "Go. The mosquitoes are biting and your mother will blame me if you catch West Nile Virus." He chuckles and winks at Val. "Go on. Shoo, shoo." With his staff, he scoots Val by the read end in the direction of Filia's cottage, down the path of tall sea grass, as if the child is a croquet ball.

Val bites his lip. He turns and tries to walk away, with the firefly nebula guiding his steps. He does not get far. A sob rips out of his chest and he turns and barrels back to the formidable mazoku, snuggling into him almost viciously. "DON'T EVER SAY SHOO AGAIN!" The fireflies scatter to the early summer breeze.

Xellos laughs again. He sounds a little more alive this time. "I never want to, Val, trust me—WHOOP…."

Backwards they tumble, off the cliff.

Val screams.

"Relax," Xellos chirps, bodily embracing him—cocooning him. With the fizzle of metal on metal etched with electricity, he teleports them both in midair, back to their safe starting position. "You see? There's nothing to be afraid of, Val. It's just me. It's just the same Xellos you were born with, the same Xellos that's always around to bug you and your mom. Insistently. Heh."

"…Yeah." The child doesn't stop cuddling. "Guess so."

Xellos persists. "Okay, let's keep thinking about this good or bad question. Listen to this logically, Val. Let's talk numbers. I'm 1012 years old, right? 13 is a number that signifies evil and 12 is just shy of 13. So that means that I do work for evil people, but am not myself fully evil. Yes? And 12 is the double of 6—another evil number. But, because it is larger than 6, it indicates that I'm…er, well, evolved in some way beyond being just 'evil.' Make sense?"

"….Yeah, but…"

"I never say things I don't mean, Val. That's why I always tell people I'm keeping secrets, rather than outright lying just to give them answers. If I tell this much to someone, I'm telling the truth."

"YEAH, I KNOW," the child becomes slightly petulant, spreading wide his small arms, while leaning his head against the mazoku's chest. "But, Xellos, what happens when you turn 1013?"

The mazoku blinks his faceted amethyst eyes. After a moment of staring at the child with deadpan consideration, he thrusts back his violet head and cackles. It is a sound much like a teakettle that has been boiling a bit too long, and for some reason it is as endearing as it is unnerving. "And thus did the logic of the five-year-old reign victorious," he chortles.

Val glowers. "I'm serious."

Xellos scoops Val up and sweeps to his feet, lifting the child high above his head, and placing him on his shoulders. "When I turn 1013, I will still be here, and I will still care for you. That is all that matters, and someday something will cause me to test myself and prove it to you. But—I will. And I guess that is all I've been trying to articulate."

"What's 'articulate'?"

"Fancy word for 'say.' "

"Oh, okay." The ancient dragon falls ponderously mute. He wraps his arms around the infamous demon's neck and presses his face to the crown of Xellos's head. Xellos always smells good. Fresh, and like candy and spicy stuff, and like being outdoors in summer. Val thinks dads should smell good like that. "Xellos? The other kids…in school…they….they talk about their dads, and they say I don't have one. But….Are you like…my dad…sorta?"

Xellos seems to stiffen, and for a moment Val feels very stupid, and hotfaced, and wants to run away and cry again.

But then Xellos speaks, in a maddeningly calm and factual tone. "….Well, Val. Would you like it if I were your dad?"

"Yes." No hesitation.

Xellos's head slowly turns, and Val can't see his feline eyes at this angle under his silken pageboy bangs. "Why's that?"

"Be-CAUSE. You love mommy and you always do stuff with us, for important things like on my birthday and Mother's Day and when I find a mud puddle and someone has to help carry heavy stuff like big rocks to help me build my forts and… and you make me feel better. Like when I have nightmares? And. Mommy cries less when you're around…and me too. And…"

"Val, do you really know what a mazoku is?" This is asked in different voice, a funny voice. A voice that is breathless and almost a little despairing. But there is a smile in that voice, too. Strange. And Xellos leans back so that the two are cheek to cheek, in a way that is companionable, comfortable—even parental.

Val scrunches up his own face and tries very hard to answer this, as if the question is a test. "It's a person who lives thousands of years, and eats other people's bad feelings. And does bad things sometimes so that there is enough bad stuff to eat to stay alive. But some mazoku are nicer than others, and some are meaner. Just like dragons and humans, and elllves and fairies, and dwarrrves, and golemmmms, annnd ummm--"

"Did your mother tell you this?"

"No, I came up with it myself and asked her, and she told me I was right. Am I right, Xellos?"

"…Basically, yes."

"And I also said to mommy that you never do that to us."

"Do what to you?"

"Make us be hurting so you can eat more."

"…No, I don't. Nor will I, ever."

"And I said to mommy that I think it means you love us."

"Yes."

"A lot. I know YOUR mommy said you can't ever say 'love.' I figured that out, too."

"…Nnnn, did you?" Spoken more like a statement than a question, and with mounting wryness.

"But you DO love us, even though you're not allowed to say 'love.'"

"Hm-hm-hm." A nasal sound, closed-mouthed and amusedly resigned. Xellos's shoulders shake a bit. "Guilty as charged."

"And that makes you a very special mazoku."

A definite chuckle rumbles deep in Xellos's chest. "Absolutely." Spoken with more than a little conceit.

"Kay, then I just…"

"Val, I'd be honored to be your dad."

The child's wings sprout from his back and spread, and beat jubilantly. "REALLY? Okay, da—"

"BUT you can't call me that."

The wings wilt. "…huh? B-but…so you want it to be a secret?" The boy's voice trembles. "Because you don't wanna be a dragon's dad…coz my egg got left behind, no one wants me.."

"No. I am proud of it. I am very proud of it, and I am very proud of you. You can tell everyone that I'm your dad. Everyone. But you can't CALL me 'dad.' Because of my mom, and boss. The one who won't let me say l-o-v-e. If she knew that I'm your dad, she'd want to take you away from your mom and me, and make you one of her servants. Forever. That would make your mom very sad. And I am afraid I'd be sad, then, too. And I don't like putting myself out, to be honest."

"…Oh. Is she mean and bad and scary?"

"She hurts people to eat. More people than she even needs to, just for fun. So you decide what that means for yourself. But she DID make me, so I have to listen to her, and follow her, sometimes."

"Kay. Yeah. I think I get it."

"So what you and I need to do is devise a code name for 'dad,' that you call me all the time and that I recognize."

"…How about… 'Xel?' "

"I like that."

"Okay, Xel." The child snuggles close to the adult. The adult lets him.


	3. Separation

**Night Light**

**A Slayers Fanfiction by Amber S. ( "AmberPalette")**

**Chapter 2: Separation**

Perhaps everyone can pinpoint a certain moment in their childhood when that distant sense that things will not always be so safe, so warm, crescendos—becomes an agony, a fact, staring them into the ground. Very much like the splash of cold air, bright lights, and loud sounds when escaping the womb—a tidal shock of discomfort.

It happened to Val yesterday.

Val never knew mom had so much blood in her. Yesterday, Val saw a lot of red on the floor, under mom.

It is not like people say. Not like everything is slow and painfully articulated, when something horrifying happens. No, it is more like running very fast, having everything turn into swirling, indiscriminate paint spatters on a sickening puce canvas. It is more like Val wants to say "STOP, slow down, let me do this over!"

Val has disturbingly clear, lurid nightmares, about a red-haired woman trying to kill him, about a red-haired man stabbing him with a sword and giving him a new name and putting a horn on his forehead, about fields of burning and bloody dragons, about his dead biological parents with lances through their heads and chests, about yelling cruel things at mom and about cutting open a black gash from dad's—no, Xel's—shoulder to his calf, about taking mom and dad and their friends to a place that is totally black and cold and has no sound except the sound of Xel's shrieks of agony as Val does something to drain out his life force, drain, leech, leech, wraith, mazoku mazoku mazoku suddenly that word has paramount clarity, paramount horrific import…something black and huge something empty and hard and cold and suffocating drags Val under and pierces his whole body, and tells him to destroy everything and start over, something called….it is a name Val knows…he cannot quite recall the name…it is a horrible name and it is so important and Val always awakes screaming and sobbing before he can recall that name…

But whenever Val has these nightmares, Xel makes it better.

Xel puts his hand on Val's forehead. Xel smiles calmly. Xel opens his eyes and holds Val in them. "No, Val. Come away. Relax, buddy." Xel's amiable nasal drone is always the last thing Val remembers before contentment and relief flood over him. All the black goes to white, like flying through clouds, except warmer, and there is a sweet taste in Val's mouth. Usually Val wakes up later in mom's arms, with Xel hovering over them both, still smiling.

Xel eats Val's nightmares, and makes him happy again. Xel is Val's protector.

But when IT started, this awful thing that has changed Val, Xel was away, on a mission.

Xel complained, before leaving, that his "mother," his boss, Beastmaster Zelas, was uncommonly abrupt about assigning this mission. He clinked his teacup irritably into the sink. He whined that it seemed tedious, even distracting, busy-work suited to lower minions than her talented and powerful Priest-General, who could easily obliterate any foe.

Yes. Xel really is mom and Val's protector.

And everyone knows it.

Even dangerous people.

Even dangerous people who still can't get a shot at mom and Val unless Xel is absent.

There was an eerie pause. Xel's shoulders hunched, as if an electrical current of realization ran through him.

Then Xel's jaw hardened and he looked at mom, and his cat eyes were very bright and ruby colored. "Don't entertain strangers until I'm back," he ordered. "ONLY people you know."

Xel almost never orders mom around. He knows it's a futile effort.

Mom looked alarmed. Her cornflower colored eyes widened. "For two weeks?"

"I will try to come back early. Promise me, Filly." Xel's eternal smile faltered just a bit.

It made Val's stomach turn, as he eavesdropped from the stairs. He felt goosebumps on his thighs.

Mom finally agreed not to invite strangers into the cottage. Then Xel embraced her more tightly than usual. He was of course smiling. But mom and Val both knew something was worrying him.

Val came downstairs and glared at Xel, willing him to explain what was worrying him.

Stiffening at Val's presence but not looking at him, Xel teleported away. It hurt Val's feelings. He didn't know why Xel avoided him—was he embarrassed of Val calling him his dad to school-friends after all, since Val had to sometimes wear skirts that mom made to hide his tail among the humans? He couldn't think of why Xel had left and not said goodbye.

And then IT started.

IT started two days ago—the feeling that everything good was ripped away and nothing was safe.

The scary red-headed lady's older sister, Luna, a tall slender lady who always seemed to stand on her tiptoes, with short lavender bangs a lot like Xel's, came by the cottage to tell mom something special. Mom knew her, so she let her come in.

Luna told mom that she was going to be made a Knight of Ceiphied for her continued deeds in the service of the shinzoku.

Mom had whispered to Luna that she was surprised to be chosen—considering the race of her long-time boyfriend.

Luna just smirked at mom and said, "Filia, remember, Xellos is a freak of nature. It is already legend, the fact that he made a pact with the Water Dragon King from beyond the grave, to, ah, well, become a wraith that eased the anguished emotions of we 'good guys.' That is, as long as the Beastmaster allows him to. He is an acceptable occupational hazard, as irritating as he can be." Then her lip quirked and Val shivered because she looked a lot like her tiny, scary red-headed sister when she did that.

That was when Val had one of his incapacitating flashbacks, his waking nightmares—and there was no Xel around to touch his forehead and make it stop.

Val, who had been eating a bowl of rice for lunch, dropped the ceramic vessel to the ground. It shattered loudly.

Both mom and Luna turned. Mom looked terrified. Luna looked calmly saddened.

Val saw neither one of them. He was already on the floor, this time having convulsions along with the waking nightmare. He did not feel mom picking him up and rocking him. He was too afraid. Too blinded by the blackness. The oily suffocation.

This vision went straight to the sensation of the winged creature, the black hole as big as a mountain, the creature with the name he couldn't remember, sucking up everything and draining everyone, making everyone shriek and beg for death, destroying everything, THROUGH Val's body, somehow… if only he could remember the name, and shout it out, if only he knew the name, maybe he could banish it forever.

In his mind the thing that consumed him was rushing down some sort of gateway, a long cylindrical tube, down towards air and light, and towards mom. Her eyes were shocked and glazed over and he was coming for her, to kill her. Xel was with her, ten feet behind her, and Val knew he was coming to kill him too.

The words "explode the thing called Filia Ul Copt from the physical plane, drain the thing called Xellos Metallium from the astral plane," flooded Val's brain. "Kill all, all in your way, kill kill kill. Start anew!" It was a toneless voice in his ears, so devastating that it crushed him, so very cold and so very full of malice, even without any living inflection. He began to sob, curling into a ball, black wings sprouting and cocooning himself, even as mom rocked him, even as he could not see her while seized by his vision.

He did not want to kill mom. He did not want to kill Xel. He did not want to kill. What was that name?

And it surfaced in Val's mind like a black lotus bloom from murky waters. A forbidden fruit. A key.

"DARKSTAR!" the child shrieked, with every fiber of his being. And the whole vision dissolved before him, and he was on the floor in the middle of a pool of vomited-up rice, in mom's cottage kitchen.

Mommy was rocking him still. But now she was sobbing, and whispering "no," over and over again.

"Damn it," Luna murmured, in her sonorous contralto, somewhere near Val's ear. "The higher-ups had hoped he would never remember being Darkstar's puppet. Being Gaav's servant was no issue, because Gaav never had more power than his siblings under Shabranigdo. But to recall servitude to a Maoh Lord as powerful as Shabranigdo was….it will threaten Ruby-Eyes's three remaining children. This causes considerable complications. Filia, where is your boyfriend?"

Val looked out the window through tear-worn eyes, and saw that night was looming, as mom breathed, "Zelas sent him on some trivial mission. He was doing everything he could to be back early. He is due home in two days. He told me to be careful. I knew something had him really scared, but he couldn't say no when the Beastmaster called him to her."

Luna swore again, more passionately. "He must be frustrated. He must know what I know, though he is powerless to cross his master—you are in danger."

Mom's voice quickly rose to a panic. "Danger? Of what?" Xel is the one who is always calm. Mom always panics.

"I will be back in the morning with reinforcements to guard your house, until Xellos is home and can continue to protect you."

"LUNA!" Now mom was screaming, holding Val so tightly to her that he thought he would be crushed. "TELL ME NOW WHAT IS GOING ON!"

"They want the child." Luna said it flatly, pointing at Val, her expression under her bangs far stormier than her voice. "They want to assimilate him into their ranks before he remembers how to utilize the power of Darkstar. They want to join him because they fear, when he comes of age, they will not be able to beat him. With your recent promotion to Knighthood of Ceiphied, and the possibility that Val would be using his remarkable powers in Ceiphied's service against Shabranigdo, it has only made the mazoku lords' desire to steal Val more urgent. This is something your Xellos has probably been fearing deep in his heart for many years, and now he sees it coming to fruition. As, I am sorry to admit, do I."

Mom cries still harder, rocking Val again.

"Filia, you must pull yourself together. There are ways to prove them wrong, and to sate their interests, and make them return to a state where Val is of no concern to them. That is what Xellos has been managing until recently, by absorbing the child's most terrifying memories of his past life. It can be prolonged indefinitely—Val can be saved from another life among monsters. But first we must keep you safe—they will be coming for him soon, hoping to outrun Xellos—they will know that they won't survive if he catches them trying to kill you, and to take the child away. They know he will kill them with the blink of an eye." Luna bent over mom and braced her shoulders. "They know he loves you."

Mom stopped rocking Val. She went quiet, and nodded.

"I will be back in the morning. Answer the door to no one but me. I will make haste." And with a heavy current of wind, Luna Inverse was gone.

But Luna Inverse was too late, with her reinforcements.

By three o'clock that morning, there was a crashing sound on the first floor of Filia Ul Copt's cottage.

This was when everything happened too fast and too hard.

A great black thing, never straying from the shadows, scuttled up the stairs. It sounded just like wind making a house creak.

It bodily lifted Val's bed, and turned it over like a boat in a storm.

Val screamed and huddled against the orb of coral light that Xel had made him as a night light months ago—to scare away monsters while Xel was gone.

It worked—the black, lupine, winged demon shied from the light, unable to approach Val, to touch him.

Mom had been sleeping by Val's bed. She surged awake, to her feet. She lifted her arms and prepared to cast a remarkably potent white magic spell called a Chaos Disintegrate. Her eyes blazed and she snarled out the incantation, fangs bared.

But the spell required many long complicated words from holy tongues. It was too slow of an attack.

The creature turned on mom, who was shadowed enough to reach, and pounced on her. Val looked away, curling into a ball. There came the sound of crunching, and of a sickening squish.

Val looked up and saw blood. Blood everywhere on the floor. And mom was lying in it, and twitching, and clinging to her neck and chest, hands scrabbling at her wound, eyes wide and terrified—but not for herself.

Val's ears were ringing. He felt like his body was light and he was stepping out of it as he made a gesture towards his injured mother.

Then the thing that made mom bleed was in Val's face—shuddering, trying to break the light-barrier of Xel's night light, the night light that was clearly more than just that.

It had almost broken that barrier when a dark object, lethally swift and soundless, careened into the monster and sent it flailing against the far bedroom wall. The beast fell into a pile of Val's dirty laundry and sundry items—red socks, tshirts, piggybank—collapsing under the pile.

And there standing between mom and Val, and the attacker, holding his gnarled wooden staff high, was Xel. His back was to Val, but whatever was on his face had the power of paralyzing the beast in fear.

Val began to weep at the relief, at the beauty of the thing he called dad. No one could ever convince him, now, that Xel was bad. No one.

"Was it you?" So calmly, so coldly, did Xel ask this question of the attacker, pointing at mom lying in blood and anguish on the floor.

The creature made no sound. Its reptilian gold eyes widened. It looked as though it were groveling.

"It's too late to apologize. Too late. You know what I will do to you for this. I am sure the Beastmaster told you what I would do if I caught you, when she sent you here." A moment of malevolence, of acid, in Xel's tone. Then, "Val," he added, still so calmly, in a carefully controlled monotone, "please look away for a moment." Still he didn't turn around. Then his shoulders tensed as if he were preparing to charge the beast again.

The beast, its jowls still soaked with mom's blood, gave a pitiful shriek, and it almost sounded human.

Xel's scornful chuckle was barely audible. And then he struck.

Val barely had time to turn away. If he had been nauseated by the sound of his mother's injuries, it was nothing next to the keening, howling, twisting, breaking noises that emanated from his closet. He thought he heard someone begging to be finished off, and then he distinctly heard Xel hissing "silence, you!" in response. The sounds ceased. It couldn't have lasted longer than ten seconds.

Then came a blinding light, incinerating, cleansing away from Val's closet space, the evidence of the murderer's own death care of Xel.

Val turned, shielding his eyes. "XEL?" For the first time he felt real panic, and heard it in his own small voice.

"I'm here, Val, I'm here. Shit." Xel's voice, somewhere above him, was hollow for a moment, strained. Very tight. An alien tone of voice, coming from Xel, and articulating only a series of barely controlled, barely not hysterical, stuttering. "Your mother…you must be good for me, and sit on your bed for a moment…sit by your night light…it protected you, good…protected…you… Val, sit…I must….your mother…I must…Filia…Filia? Sweetheart. FILIA. Filia, LOOK at me. Filly, you must look at me, I must know if I can move you someplace to be healed—FILIA."

Mechanically Val sat. He realized that the room was shaking because he was convulsing again, but this time the fear came from something outside, in front of him—not something in his mind.

Xel was bending over mom. His face was calculatedly blank, but he was not controlling that blankness well—it distorted spasmodically into a shaken, or sometimes enraged, expression. Still he strove for composure. He was holding mom's body like a ragdoll's in his arms, carefully, and he was trying, in a low, rapid, desperate current of pleas, each clinging to self-soothing logic, to rouse her. He tried everything, trivial and grave—from accusing mom of letting Val miss a midnight snack to telling her that he did not want to endure eternity without her.

Mom was still breathing, but she did not respond.

Xellos's silky purple hair was in ten directions, ruffled, his cloak hanging off one shoulder, all of him disheveled. He sat back suddenly, both hands clutching at his head, when mom didn't even reply to a sharp gibe that her tail was ugly and she looked fat in her favorite pink dress. "Oh, fuck," the intensely filthy word slipped between the eternally polite mazoku's gritted fangs. He raked through his hair and simply stared, agitatedly, down at mom. And again, "Fuck." Now rage filled his face, combating the terror—rage, and almost resentment that he was imprisoned to loving this woman and her child so much, and hurting so much at their pain, rather than relishing it. "I can't believe this. I won't tolerate this nonsense." The pragmatic, logical, cool side was trying to resurface in that bizarrely petulant, added remark. It did not succeed. Again Xellos looked intensely nervous.

Xellos was not invincible or perfect, in that moment. He was not smug or confident. He was not even calm. He was acting emotional. Dramatic. Irrational.

He was scared. He was as scared as Val was. For Xellos was a mazoku, and had no idea how to use healing magic. How very alien such weakness, such helplessness, must feel to him.

And suddenly he seemed to realize this. Because, for all his impenetrable calm, at last Xellos's face registered full and uncompromised horror. At the same time, it seemed to jolt him to action. "No," he murmured. "Filia. I HAVE to move you to a healer…PLEASE wake up so I can ascertain if I can move you safely…"

It was Xellos's inability to wake mom up, and not the attack, not the blood, that made Val start screaming. And he could not stop.

He could not see Xellos well through his tears, but it looked as if Xellos's face were twisted too, the way a face is twisted when the person is trying not to cry. Or, in Xellos's case, is essentially unable to cry, but feels a desperate urge, a pressure deep in the chest, to do so. "Val, come here. Oh Val. Damn it. I have to get your mother to a healer. VAL. STOP."

The vague helplessness in the voice of Val's surrogate father only made him less able to stop screaming, or shaking, or crying.

And that was when, on the tail of Luna Inverse, Elder Milgasia and five other golden dragon elders arrived—and changed everything.

And took Val away.

That was yesterday.

Val is scared today. Val does not like caverns. Val has disturbing nightmares, sometimes quite lucid memories, of being inside a deep dark cavern, pierced up and down by eerily sparkling gray stalactites and stalagmites, stinking of sulfur and mildew, the air choked with dampness. Val vaguely recalls doing something very bad in such a place, to mom, and to Xel, and to their human friends. He doesn't remember what it is, but it makes him tremble without ceasing.

He hates it here, in the lair of the remaining golden dragon elders. He hates that he has been sent here. He hates that they think he would like them just because they're dragons like he is. He hates that they think he would be bad with someone just because that someone is a mazoku.

Val misses Xel.

Xel stepped away from mom, and went to hold Val, and said no—when they came to take Val.

Xel said no in a really weird, dead voice. Xel looked really stiff when he said no. Xel had mom's blood on his yellow shirt when he said that, when he held Val against him. But Xel wasn't the one who made mom bleed. Xel never makes mom bleed.

And Xel tried to take Val away with him instead—but Elder Milgasia has always hated Xel, and so when he came for Val, to take him here, he wouldn't allow it.

Elder Milgasia said it was all Xel's fault, what happened to mom, because of his "associations."

Val doesn't know what that word means, but he was too sick and scared to ask when Elder Milgasia used it.

Then Elder Milgasia accused Xel of "playing around" and "pretending" to love mom.

But Val was too sick and scared to tell Elder Milgasia that Xel DOES love mom and that it's mean to say he doesn't.

Xel looked angrier than Val has ever seen him, when Elder Milgasia picked Val up and held him away. Xel's eyes turned so red that there were no whites anymore. His teeth turned sharp like a wolf's, and the skin of his lips tightened and pulled back to let the fangs drop down even more. His flesh started to glow red too, the way it does whenever something dangerous, like the thing that hurt mom, is around Val and Xel is about to attack it. "Give him back," Xel commanded, and it sounded more like he was growling than talking. "Or Milgasia, I swear…"

"You won't harm me in front of this child if you truly love him." Elder Milgasia had a sharp voice when he said that. Sharp and triumphant.

And then when Xel tried to coldly counter, and say that Elder Milgasia had no idea how much he loved Val, Elder Milgasia smirked, because Xel can't say the word "love."

Elder Milgasia even taunted Xel and said he couldn't hear what he was saying, when Xel choked on the word and went gray-skinned.

Elder Milgasia is such a nice person, until he is around Xel. Val doesn't quite understand why, but he thinks it might have something to do with that thing no one ever talks about in front of him, the War of the Monsters' Fall.

No one but Xel—because Xel is so honest with Val.

Val loves Xel. He misses him.

The arguing over where Val was to go went on and on, and Val cried until his belly hurt, and reached for Xel until his arms ached. But Elder Milgasia wouldn't give him back to Xel.

And now Val is exiled to this underground cavern, with mom, to be "hidden" until the big mean lady called Zelas Metallium doesn't want to steal him away anymore.

Mom is in another room, bedfast and being healed.

Elder Milgasia told Val that mom may die, because she lost too much blood before the healing spells started.

Val wouldn't listen. Val can't feel much right now. He hasn't cried since they took him away from Xel, and blamed Xel for bringing injuries down on mom, using that big word "associations" again.

Xel just looked at Val when they took him away with mom to hide in the golden dragon caves. He touched his head to Val's. "I'll see you soon, I promise," he said. "Nothing and no one can stop me." And Xel smiled crookedly, confidently, down at Val, and gave him the goodnight kiss on the forehead. So Val knew Xel meant it when he said he promised.

But Xel hasn't come back all day. Elder Milgasia is going to try to find Val a companion, and possible guardian, if mom dies, and he is not going to let that person be Xel.

Mom is not going to die. Val won't listen to Elder Milgasia.

Val is lonely. Val is scared today. Val misses Xel.


	4. Auditions

**Auditions**

_The voice was carefree and even personable. It was the friendliest voice I'd heard in a long time… There, in the small clearing, stood a young man. He looked around twenty years old and seemed of medium stature—neither too short nor tall, thin nor fat—with a head of silky black hair cropped just below his chin. He wore the black robes common to all priests and held a priest's staff that looked right out of the discount bin. I considered his features fairly handsome, though there wasn't anything remarkable about them save for the rather out-of-place smile on his lips…He began casting a spell, the calm smile never leaving his face …As the air whooshed and whined, dozens of balls of light sprung forth around the priest…The massive roar was followed by a concussive shockwave and, finally, by a blast of overheated air. The hands I slapped over my ears barely managed to keep my eardrums from bursting… "My, my," the priest said clicking his tongue, like a waiter had goofed up his order of scrambled eggs…His tone was more amused than agitated. He scratched his head, his face skewed with mild perplexity. _

_I think I've met my first sociopath. _

_--From Hajime Kanzaka's _Slayers 5: The Silver Beast_, p. 63-69._

It is the first fortnight after Filia Ul Copt's mauling by an underling of Zelas Metallium. The first fortnight after Luna Inverse's and Xellos Metallium's fears come true—fears of Zelas's piqued interest in Val as a potentially powerful slave of the mazoku. It is because Filia would have no such repeat-horror for her son that she now rests on the brink of death.

It is also the first fortnight after Val has been ostracized from both his adoptive parents—Filia, in injury, and Xellos, in banishment from dragon territory.

Val is hoisted into a chair that he finds too tall and too stiff in a room that is too bright and too shiny. He squints and shields his eyes, and his ears feel too hot while his calves feel too cold.

Finally Val's eyes focus. He is sitting at the far end of a pointy Gothic table. Each seat is occupied by a stern-faced male golden dragon elder in long robes of white, and a silken sash of blue and gold. Their faces are all different, but all set in stony resolve.

Val dislikes them all immediately.

Val misses Xellos. Xellos has a serene smile. A calm face, a friendly face. Xellos always seems to accept Val, his flaws, weird dreams, almond-flavored fears, all of it.

These people may be dragons, but they glare at Val like he is a problem, a quandary—the source of a famine, or backed-up sewage.

Xellos is dad, no matter what they say. He just is. And these people are intruders. It's not fair that they've exiled him. Val needs Xellos.

But Elder Milgasia has brought Val to this meeting, in this room of glistening gold walls and quartz stalactites. Val tried to argue, because he wanted to sneak into Filia's room—mom's room—again, and watch her sleep, and make sure she is still breathing. But not tonight.

The dragon elders have stripped mom naked and swaddled her from head to foot in white bandages. They have hung her from a secured hammock on the ceiling, so that no pressure is placed on her strained spine, devastated ribs, and ravaged neck.

When Xellos followed them into the underground dragon hideout, he tried to go to mom. His body propelled forward with fluid motion, towards the door to mom's room.

But at this single movement, the entire dragon population transformed into their great reptilian forms. They spread their spider-veined wings in a great yellow-gold wall and blocked her door.

Xellos let out a bestial snarl, from deep in his slender chest. He crouched low, lip curling resentfully. He spoke two words in a husky, hollow voice: "Please move."

They didn't move. They snarled back. A few drew in deep breaths, fire brimming in their throats.

"_Move_," Xellos repeated. His eyes snapped open and flared from amethyst to ruby. Now his flawless white teeth distended and became wolf fangs, angry, gleaming. He could have killed them all easily. Val has never seen Xellos hurt even an ant on the dining room table, but somehow, the child instinctively knows this. Maybe it's the conversation they had a couple of weeks before mom was…

Never mind. Val can't think about it right now. Not when Xel isn't here to hug him and suck up the bad feelings.

Just as Xellos began to charge for the central, muscular pair of dragon bucks guarding mom's door, he hesitated.

He cast an unsure look at Val out of the rim of his slanted cat-eyes. "Won't you look away, Val?" His voice was so different when he addressed Val directly. So much softer.

Val shook his head slowly, once. His knees trembled.

Xellos made a frustrated sound. There was a look of rare, transparent agony coldly indented on his face. It made even Elder Milgasia balk a little. Then Xellos spoke, and his voice was tight and arctic again. "Very well."

He promised Val he would be back soon. Then he disappeared again.

Mom is still lying in her room, in her hammock. Still asleep.

Mom looks like a caterpillar waiting for the miracle of wings in its cocoon. Her face is still so beautiful, even when it is pale, and sweaty, and pained, and unconscious. Her dandelion yellow hair hangs in a long tight braid below her. Val feels dumb about this, but he likes to touch mom's braid and smell it when no one is looking.

Someone fiercely interrupts Val's daydream about being with mom, about Xellos's self-restraint for Val's sake.

"SO!" An elder with a long, lean, vulpine face and a hard voice speaks up, making Val jump in his seat. "This is the infamous last ancient dragon? Darkstar's vessel? Mmmyes. He has that…shifty… look of the ancient dragons' ambitions in his eyes."

"That will do." Milgasia rises from his seat, next to Val's, with cool grace. "I'll NOT hear anyone disparaging this child. He is Filia Ul Copt's son. None among us is so brave as she, a Knight of Flarelord Ceiphied. Surely none of us has forgotten her father Bazard Ul Copt, and his righteous conduct. Whatever the child's bloodlines, he has been raised in such righteousness."

The fox-face meshes his fingers, more closely appraising Val. His breath reeks of coffee and mothballs as he leans across Milgasia to rudely stare. "I still say his eyes are sneaky. Ambitious. All there is to it. He DOES remember things, after all. Isn't that why he's been brought here? Why that filthy Beastmaster of Shabranigdo wants him now?"

Val knows his eyes are gold-colored, but he never thought about how else they looked. He never thought he was sneaky. He wishes Xel were here, so he could ask what "ambition" means. His toes curl around his chair legs.

"I have half a mind to send them back to their cottage," rumbles a blunt-faced elder seated next to fox-face. "Filia Ul Copt renounced the priesthood years ago. She forfeited the right to our protection. I don't care how much the Knighthood of Ceiphied loves her now."

Val hears an abrupt animal growl in his ear. He jumps, and gasps.

It's the sound Xellos made when he attacked that thing that hurt mom.

Val looks around, but Xel isn't visible. Oh, but he's here. Val feels it. He distantly smells what earth smells like after rain, and cinnamon pastries, and vanilla.

Xel's scent.

Suddenly Val feels brave. He glares right at the fox-faced elder who called him that funny word.

The elder gawks and recoils.

In his ear, Val hears playful, dry laughter. Xel's laughter.

Xel really IS here.

Val speaks up. His five-year-old voice is shaky but audible. "I wanna know why mom and I are here if you don't want us. I wanna know if we're in trouble. Is it just coz I remembered that demon's name and how I did bad stuff for him?" He turns to Milgasia, tugging on his white rob sleeve. "Where's Xel? Why'd you send him away again?"  
"Zell?" A portly, toad-faced elder at the far end of the table blinks his beady eyes. "Who the blazes is Zell?"

Elder Milgasia stiffens. He speaks factually. "It is Val's name for the Lesser Beast of Wolfpack Island. A problematic attachment has formed between Dame Ul Copt and the monster. It is what drew the attentions of the Greater Beast and her minions to the child. The monster, Xellos Metallium, is after all much like the favored son of Zelas Metallium…"

"Nuh uh," Val protests urgently. He gives Milgasia's sleeve a rougher yank. Then he points at fox-face. "That guy just said it's coz I remembered D-Darkstar, not coz of Xel!"

And then a voice belonging to no one in the room croons, "None of this is your fault, Val. Never think otherwise."

Val blinks, spinning round in his seat so agitatedly, so eagerly and hopefully, that his hair whips in his eyes. He knows that voice, but he still doesn't see its owner, not even when he brushes his aqua bangs out of his vision.

Then someone speaks the unseen person's name. "XELLOS METALLIUM?"

The fat dragon is the one who barks it. He shoots to his feet with the violence of a bottle rocket, upsetting the watergoblets on the table with a metallic clamor. "The DETESTED mazoku?! The dragonsbane?! By what means has this child come to know HIM?"

"He's my dad," Val finds himself blurting. His face flushes. "I call him Xel because if I call him dad it makes the monsters want me even more. And he's not a problem." He scowls. "He's my best friend."

In his ear, for Val alone to hear, the invisible Xellos purrs. "That's my boy." His voice becomes velvet. The voice Val knows so well. "Val. They'll keep telling you things in here that might make it hard to trust me. Don't cave. Don't listen. It's what they want."

"If he's not a problem, boy, then how can you account for his blame in your mother's near-murder?" a third elder with tousled hair snaps, almost on cue.

"Xel SAVED mom and me!" Val shakily protests, standing up in his chair. "He tried to get back in time! It's not his fault! If it weren't for him, mom and me woulda both been killed! He gave me a night light! It's not his fault!"

"ALL of our suffering is that creature's fault, BOY!" the fat dragon roars, pounding the table. "He has deceived you!"

"Their words are nothing," Xellos counters in Val's head. "You know what I feel for you, even if I can't say it."

Val's head hurts.

The fat dragon rages on. "LISTEN, BOY!"

"DON'T listen," Xel hisses.

"In your previous life, your 'DAD' Xellos tried to KILL you and YOU tried to reciprocate! Do you not remember how he drove his staff into your wrist, how he laughed like a maniac? I should wager your MOTHER does, and how she can love that thing you call 'dad,' and let it NEAR you, after that…."

Xel's feral growl resounds in Val's mind again. Val smells cinnamon and rainy earth and honeysuckle almost overpoweringly. It hypnotizes him, keeps him from falling into hysterics at the memories that the vindictive elder is trying to resurrect.

Val wavers in his chair, mouth ajar, caught between the impulse to hyperventilate and the impulse to drift peacefully to sleep. Care of the invisible but present Xellos, the latter urge seems to be winning. "He made me a night light…"

"ANSWER! Do you remember, young Val-GAAV?"

A disapproving murmur hums among the more charitable, and less outspoken, elders at this deliberate dig.

"A…A night light and it kept me safe…"

"VALGAAV! ANSWER!"

"_I'll kill that one."_ Xel's quiet fury sears Val's brain.

"N-no, don't," Val stutters, to the voice that anyone else would consider a sinister auditory hallucination. "P-please."

The fire emanating from the invisible Xel obediently dwindles. "But he hurt you," the voice nevertheless persists. "Still…Here. Maybe this will help…"

With this declaration, Val feels secure, almost drugged, again.

"Behold! See how he grows faint under the truth! Answer for your crimes and those of your 'DAD,' Valgaav!"

"ENOUGH!" Milgasia blocks, raising a quelling hand. "There will be NO TALK of Val's slavery under Gaav! He is only a CHILD!"

Both extreme urges, to break down or to drift peacefully, exit Val's body in a sudden jolt, as if he's leapt into a cold stream on a baking summer afternoon. He feels a lump rising in his throat. He sinks low in his chair.

But no, Xel is still there. "Don't LISTEN," he presses. "They are pompous nothings. Do NOT listen."

Val tries again. "I kn-know that I h-hurt Xel and m-m-mom before I w-went into my egg and hatched, but when I have n-nightmares about it Xel sucks 'em up and makes me feel better—"

"Because it's hungry, not because it loves you!" the fox-face interjects.

"Stop screaming at the child," Milgasia snarls, bodily shielding Val from their hard, bright, scrutinizing glares.

"DON'T CALL XEL 'IT' LIKE HE'S A DOG OR SOMETHIN'!" Val shrieks, in the same instant, standing in his chair and stomping a foot on the table. His black tail lashes and, in his emotional outburst, his wings sprout and beat against the back of the restraining tall chair. His young voice rings madly in the hall.

"He is LESS than a dog," the fat dragon seethes, unintimidated. "He butchers golden dragons and he knows how to do it with lethal efficiency, while SMILING. He is vile. Accept this, child. Just ACCEPT this."

"Maybe he knows how to kill dragons but it doesn't mean he's gonna do it again," Val croaks. He wilts back into his chair. Once again, he stammers, "he made me a night light," as though this should be intrinsically understood by all present—the protection, the compassion, that went into the making of that night light. But somehow none of them sees it.

"A weak argument, lad," a fourth dragon elder with a contemplative face muses. "Zelas Metallium's priest-general will do whatever she says. Even if it means turning on your mother, or you, and killing you."

"B-but…" Val gulps. "He promised me that he'd never…"

"Val," comes the gentle velvet voice. "Val, it's okay. Stop defending me, it only makes them angrier at you and I don't need them to like me. Heh. Trust me, I don't. You and I know the truth."

Val curls into a ball in his chair. He knows he should be crying, but he just can't do it. He tries to listen to Xel.

Milgasia places a cold hand on Val's back. The child shrinks away mutinously as the dragon elder rings a small bronze gong. "Order, I demand order," Milgasia rumbles. "It is not the WELL-established LACK of character of Xellos Metallium that we are here to discuss…"

"Poopface, there goes YOUR Christmas card," Xellos's sly, conspiring voice rings in Val's head. His grin is audible, and it tickles Val.

Val suddenly giggles, covering his mouth and avoiding the perplexed stares of several elders.

"…but rather," Milgasia continues without missing a beat, "the choice of temporary guardian and confidante for Val Ul Copt, while his mother Filia Ul Copt convalesces, and while said mazoku Xellos Metallium supposedly convinces his mistress to drop her claims on the child. It is also NOT in question," he adds sharply over the protests of fox-face and fat dragon, "that we will protect them for HOWEVER long is necessary." His burning ore eyes rivet the two disgruntled elders in place. "Get used to it, gentlemen. Now. There is a list of close acquaintances of Dame Ul Copt's from which to select auditions, as it were, for Val's temporary…" He clears his throat with a hasty stolen glance at Val "…or possibly permanent…guardian, as it is clear in dame Ul Copt's living will that Val not be forced to live among us in the case of her…passing."

Val tries to block out Milgasia's words, but he can't block out all of them. He feels guilty for being angry at Milgasia now. He remembers how kind Milgasia is to him, at least when Xel isn't around. This confuses him. He doesn't know why he has to choose between them.

"You don't," comes Xel's voice once again in his head, softly reading his thoughts. "Not as far as I'm concerned. Val…I will be with you soon. I will find a way."

"Thanks, Xel," Val mumbles.

"What was that, Val?" Milgasia puts a hand on Val's back again, and this time Val doesn't shrink away.

"Nothin'," Val shrugs, not meeting eyes with him—feeling, somehow, traitorous, despite Xel's comforting words.

Auditions begin the next morning.

Lina Inverse, Princess Amelia Wil Teszla Saillune, Zelgadiss Greywords, Princess Sylphiel, and Gourry Gabriev are already aware of Filia Ul Copt's severe injuries; Lina's sister delivered the news. Today they are brought to the subterranean golden dragon temple. The five are seated in the same conference room in which Val was interrogated the previous evening.

Each dazed candidate is tersely informed of the purpose of the visit.

For the following five days, each of the candidates will spend a day caretaking Val, without assistance. Val is to then choose his favorite of the five to be his prospective guardian.

Lina is of course the first to break the shocked silence. Her face screws up with skepticism. "What the hell happened to Xellos? He's been M.I.A. for a week now."

Milgasia, their host, grinds his jaw. His voice is carefully calm and crystalline. "I fail to see how Zelas Metallium's Lesser Beast has any connection to this conversation. But to answer, we have forbidden Xellos access to Filia and her child while they are here."

"That's asinine," Zelgadiss remarks, crossing his legs and folding his arms across his chest. "I hate Xellos myself, but in any event, it's still asinine."

"No shit." Lina lets out a snort, her own legs straddled.

"Doesn't Xellos keep Val happy?" Sylphiel coos, bashfully chewing on a nail.

"That's what I thought," Amelia adds, a vague and worried look in her eyes.

"What?" Gourry cocks his head in confusion.

Milgasia's smile is so tight that if he made a sudden move, they would expect his face to shatter like glass. "I beg your pardon?" he retorts through his teeth, at the same time that Gourry speaks.

Lina flings her arms above her head. "Oh COME on. He was always the one that babysat the kid when Filia was away. I've never seen that crazy priest more devoted to anyone in a natural, dare I say HUMAN, way, than that little boy. You can't go blaming him for Filia's injuries just because Zelas suddenly decides Val is gonna be her new pet. And to top it all: US as PARENTS? HAW. C'mon, Milgasia! You guys haven't changed for millennia. Innit time to bend a bit for an unusual mazoku?"

"This discussion is over," Milgasia snaps. Then abruptly he becomes polite again, bowing. "Miss Inverse, since you are so outspoken in this matter, consider yourself the volunteer to go first. Have fun babysitting."

Zelgadiss chuckles dryly.

Lina turns a shade of puce.

Day One: Lina.

Lina walks into Val's quartz-walled guest bedroom. Val turns and looks at her. His eyes widen, and he starts screaming "NIGHTMARE" hysterically. He begins to fling hard and sharp objects at the room at her. Lina gawks—and dodges. After five minutes of trying to even touch the terrified child, who has curled into a trembling fetal ball, she leaves, in shock.

But Val doesn't cry. Milgasia is worried.

Day Two: Amelia.

Amelia comes armed with teddy bears, bags upon bags of candy, and new fuzzy pajamas. She tries to get Val to wear the pajamas to bed, because it's drafty and they will keep him warm. He refuses. She tries to get Val to cuddle the bear. He throws it out of the bed. She tries to talk to Val about heaven, and tell him to be happy and not sad if Filia dies. She flies into high-pitched speech mode, leaping on top of a pillar and gesturing theatrically, when she does this. But Val screams at her to stop telling him he can't be sad. Val grabs the bag of candy and eats all of it. Then he sprouts his wings and hovers up the wall, and tries to climb up and hang off a stalactite, in his angry hyperactivity. Amelia starts sobbing because he won't come down, and two dragon guards have to escort her out. Val, still hanging upside down off the stalactite, screams at her "YEAH, YOU'D BETTER GO!"

But Val doesn't cry. Milgasia is worried.

Day Three: Zelgadiss.

Zelgadiss tries the cool, gentle approach. He takes a seat at the foot of Val's bed and starts to read a book. He doesn't talk to Val unless Val talks to him. Val likes this space at first, and he likes how Zelgadiss never talks down to him like he's a baby, or preach at him, and he likes Zelgadiss's sense of humor and the fact that he answers all his questions without getting annoyed. But at bedtime when Val hugs Zelgadiss, the chimera is hard, and stiff, and doesn't hug him back. Val is afraid to ask for a goodnight kiss on the forehead. And he doesn't sleep all night.

And Val doesn't cry. Milgasia is worried.

Day Four: Sylphiel.

Val does all kinds of naughty things to provoke Auntie Sylphiel, like not wash his hands after using the bathroom, and using dirty words. Auntie Sylphiel cannot seem to be brave enough to scold him for it. All she ever does is smile and call him a "good boy." This makes him mad, and he doesn't know why. "You're NOT my mom," he shouts, when she tries to smooth his hair. "You're NOT Xel," he shouts, when she tries to cast a healing spell on his mind so he forgets some of his nightmares. He lies there stiffly when she sings him a lullaby, and doesn't speak to her when she leaves the next morning.

And Val doesn't cry. Milgasia is worried.

Day Five: Gourry.

Things go really smoothly at first. In fact Val and Gourry get along famously. Gourry doesn't smother him, but he hugs him. Gourry doesn't always know the answers to his questions, but he tries, and he doesn't talk down to him, either. They share an ice cream cone and then Gourry reads Val his favorite bedtime story. But then Gourry eats too much dinner and falls asleep, and Val sneaks out of his room to go see Filia. Val walks in on the other dragons changing her bandages. All he can see is the red of his unconscious mother's blood. He flies into hysterics again. When he is carried back to his room and to a puzzled Gourry, he refuses to let Gourry hug him. And when Gourry tries to give him a goodnight kiss on his forehead, he scratches Gourry's face, screams "I WANT MY NIGHT LIGHT," and runs out of the room again.

But Val doesn't cry. Milgasia gives up and tells the company that they can go home in the morning.

Five discouraging, frustrating days over, Lina and friends congregate at a table in the underground temple of the fire dragon king. Lina idly muses aloud, while rubbing her temples to fend off a migraine.

"I never thought Val would ever be considered a threat to the monster race again. It never occurred to me that people remembered their past lives—but even then, it's not like Val would do anything to destroy anyone, and it's not like he has any kind of MEANS to execute hare-brained world domination schemes this time around."

"I'm not sure Zelas Metallium thinks quite that rationally, Lina," Zelgadiss murmurs. He whets his stone lips while partitioning plates of rich seafood provided by the dragons, just like every other night of their stay. "She'll want the child simply as a vendetta against Filia, to prove who's still the alpha female in Xellos's roost. I'd hate to be him—I don't think Xellos is used to having conflicted loyalties." The chimera looks a little smug at the thought of the Claire-Bible-butchering mazoku's discomfort.

Amelia makes a distasteful sound at her lover's summation. "What a horrible creature."

"Well, YEAH, she IS a daughter of Shabranigdo." Lina inhales her deep fried fish fillet, belching fit to put any titanic, hairy man to shame. "You know what's even MORE of a shocker, though?" she grunts.

"Besides your un-ladylike belching?" Gourry injects.

Sylphiel giggles with strained flirtatiousness, but Gourry isn't looking at her. Amelia casts her fellow royal female a look of pity before snuggling closer to Zelgadiss.

"Shut up, Gourry," Lina barks. "Anyway. What shocks ME the most is that Xellos even gives a shit about them. I mean REALLY gives a shit, not just thinking of them as a passing fancy. Part of me always thought he was head over heels for Filia, the way she'd get him so damned mad in a heartbeat, the way he followed her around and taunted her and stared at her all the time like the little boy pulling on the little girl's pigtails, all the way through the Darkstar Campaign… but the less trusting side of me honestly has been holding my breath for years waiting for that day when Filia sends me a hysterical letter that Xellos has left her for good."

"Remember the deal he made with the spirit of the Water Dragon King, though," Amelia wistfully recalls. "An eternity loving Filia alone, in return for his life, when he was almost killed five years ago." She clasps her hands and sighs, eyes resembling the Milky Way.

Lina keeps musing. "Ha. Yeah, the great Xellos. The stunning, awesomely powerful Xellos. HAW-ha. It's funny, Xellos has always seemed pretty handsome to me but in a nondescript way. Just kinda…there, you know? Filia and Milgasia always wax poetic about how he's so gorgeous and painfully exquisite and shit like that. I wonder if it's some sort of luring device for his chosen prey." She snorts. "Like vampires and how they put off tasty scents for the people they want to drink. Haw."

"People want to taste their lovers?" Gourry gawks. "Hey listen I know I have a big appetite but JEEZ…"

Everyone ignores the swordsman's cerebral lethargy.

"I think it's more an issue of one's overpowering sentiments skewing external perceptions," Zelgadiss coolly rumbles. "Filia feels intense love for Xellos, and Milgasia intense hate. To them he's extraordinary. You just see him as a convenience tool, Lina. To you he's plain. Unmemorable."

"That was harsh." But Lina cackles.

"And to Val, he's beautiful too. It's pretty clear who Val wants to take care of him." Amelia interjects this almost unwillingly. "The same person we saw pop off Mr. Balgumon's head like a ripe tomato. The same guy who killed Miss Mazenda while smiling. Who almost got us killed twice, once for Fibrizo, once to win over Val when he was Valgaav…Who killed off a third of the golden dragons in one fell swoop…He's just so…so…" She clenches her fists as though afraid to say the word, as though it would make the quality real, and condemn Val to a surrogate father who is unquestionably toxic. "…So…"

"Evil?" The voice is chillingly familiar. Chillingly congenial, and curious. With a fizzling sound, Xellos teleports into the center of the huddled company, already seated. He surveys Amelia with the usual barely-concealed condescending mirth that he exhibits towards her naivety.

She gazes guiltily down at her plate. "I might not have been thinking to employ THAT harsh a term."

"Don't patronize me," the mazoku purrs. "I'm quite familiar with your contrived, artificial schemas of 'good' and 'evil,' Princess." There is more acid behind his words, and his staggering cat-eyes, than usual. He even pauses to blink, as though puzzled at himself. "Hmm," he adds enigmatically, his mildly perplexed frown deepening.

"You seem stressed," Lina observes with laudable ease. She twirls some of her disheveled, fiery orange hair in a finger, with mocking coquettishness, at the fourth most formidable mazoku in their world.

This irritating casualness is not lost on Xellos. "The l-o-v-e," he testily spells out the taboo word, "of my life is lying on her deathbed and I am refused the right to see her, AND I am refused the right to visit her son, MY son," he gazes evasively over their heads, their shock at his claim of ownership, "and comfort him. What on EARTH would be stressing me?" He looks again at Lina.

If looks could burn like oil of vitriol…

While, somehow, paired with serene smiles…

It would come close to how Xellos is now staring at Lina. Close.

But Lina just trumpets a laugh. "Point taken. Unfortunately we can't seem to help the kid either. He's terrified of me for some reason…"

"That's because, against my advice, his mother has always used you as something synonymous with the bogey man in order make him behave. 'Eat your veggies, or the redheaded lady who eats too much will eat YOU. Booga-booga.' He even has nightmares about you. Heh."

"Well, HELL. That's…nice. Anyway. Zel, Gourry, Amelia, even Sylphiel, had barely more luck than me. But the dragons are determined to find him a legal guardian."

"And I remain so unimaginable a prospect?" The searing tone of Xellos's voice is startling. He almost sounds petulant. "It should be ME they ask. ME. He's known ME all his life. I've ALWAYS been there. I tell you, their narrow-mindedness BOGGLES me." He begins to pace like a lithe, agitated wolf. "The child is MISERABLE without his mother, and I am all he has. I have tried to communicate with him while remaining invisible…but they have so many white magic spells in this place that my black magic weakens quickly and they can detect me, and I have to leave him again. Shy of massacring the lot of them, I don't know what I could do if they caught me and tried to attack me for breeching their exile. IT SIMPLY BOGGLES ME."

"Miserable? Massacres? Ah. That must be like candy to you." Zelgadiss's words come out sharp. His faded blue-gray eyes are merciless, like his granite jaw. "What an elaborate façade of angst and concern you present this time around, Xellos. Tuh. Like you REALLY care."

"Wha-T?" Xellos leans over Lina and enunciates so crisply that the sorceress, pulling a face, thinks he may have just spit on her arm. His smile is so brilliant and high-strung that it borders on the psychotic.

Zelgadiss shrugs, his tone sliding to a darker, more cynical register still. "Well. I didn't realize Filia was always THAT short a temper tantrum away from a feast for you. She and that kid must be a convenient setup."

A nerve tingles. The electrical charge of outrage is almost audible.

And Xellos jolts to his feet. The table roils, the silverware jingles over Lina and Amelia's squeals of protest and Sylphiel's gasp, a fork or two falling to the floor.

The mazoku's eyes flare from amethyst to magenta to crimson so fast that the change is almost imperceptible, and those feline eyes contract until they are nearly invisible.

"Say that again, Mr. Greywords, and I'll kill you. You know nothing. NOTHING."

His voice is perfectly congenial, but Lina and her friends have never seen such a sincere expression on his face. The smile is gone. It's disturbing.

So disturbing that Zelgadiss's mouth hangs open, then closes, and he opts to refrain from any comebacks aside a soft grunt and another "I see."

Amelia puts her hand on the chimera's taut, solid arm and rivets her sapphire eyes on Xellos. "You can't blame us for our assumptions, Mr. Xellos," she snaps into the crackling silence. "We know you primarily as an opportunist of the first order. Not to mention, a killer."

Xellos's laugh is mirthless, and so brittle that it sounds like dry autumn leaves crunching. "You flatter me," he drawls. "But I don't give a damn, really, what any of you thinks of me."

"We've long since surmised that, Xellos, old pal," Lina retorts wryly.

"Well then, out of idle curiosity, do you really all share such contempt for my character? Can you really see me as so uniformly abominable, or is one of you going to try and conceive that who and what I am shifts based on the other person?"

Xellos employs the velvet, ominous force of his voice as he leans in and locks eyes with the sorceress.

"Even your sister sees me more clearly than that, Miss Lina. It was she who explained to Filia…" And he stumbles at a short twinge of pain at that name, making Lina wince with a strange, shocked sort of empathy "…how I was trying to protect Val from my mistress. I am at open war with my own creator now. It cannot end that way. How am I to reconcile my feelings for my dragoness and her child with my pledge of loyalty to my maker? But I must, for their sake, and I will. And it DISGUSTS me that no one sees what my actions imply of my devotion to Filia and Val. Really, it is a SIMPLE exercise of LOGIC."

"Xellos, no one in this room is really stupid enough to think you don't love Filia Ul Copt." Lina's words are level and steely. "It's clear that she's like water to your lightning. Wherever she settles, you flash to and fro incessantly. You stroke in and out of her and always go but always come back. She's your harbor, your source, your refueler, whatever the hell you wanna call it. And that's kind of spectacular, even admirable, considering what a creepy asshole you are."

Xellos emits a peculiar laugh, through his nose. "Why, thank you." His eyebrows lift. He regards Lina bemusedly, as if she were a very entertaining flea caught red-handed biting his flesh.

"But that DOESN'T mean you know how to take care of a KID, and that's where this whole chat over Val's well-being comes in."

Xellos's smile quivers and then falls flat. His face is otherwise utterly composed. He draws in a deep pensive breath, and exhales. "I don't understand." Each syllable is painfully crisp again.

"Stop spitting on me," Lina growls.

But for all her bravado, the entire group subtly shifts away from Xellos's dangerously placid face. They know that look well. Amelia rubs her forearms to hide her goosebumps.

"You are in accord with Milgasia, then?" The mazoku presses. His lips are almost motionless when he makes this query. His eyes snap shut. The air around him seems to palpably darken.

"I'm not 'in accord' with anyone over this just yet," Lina hisses, "but it's clear that no one ELSE at this table is capable of taking care of Val. And it's clear there's no one he wants to be with more than YOU."

"Then it seems we're back to square one."

"Seems like it."

"Fine. To hell with all of you." Xellos is absurdly cheerful when he says this. His eyes flash open and it makes them all jump back as he elaborates: "I'll just prove my competence to the appropriate…heh… 'authorities.' Just as I have already done to Filia. Such a gesture seems perfectly practical. Hm-hm-hm! My heavens."

"Meaning?"

"I will visit Val every day of his mother's convalescence, no matter what I am dealing with, and in doing so, I will make it perfectly well established that I care for the child and would do anything to make him happy."

Lina and her friends gawp at Xellos in unabashed awe.

"What?" He blinks, cocking his head birdishly.

"Mister…Xellos…" Amelia whimpers it almost uncertainly, a deep frown marring her pixie face. Then her eyes become misty. "I don't know what to…so sweet…it…" Her lip trembles.

Xellos's face reaches the closest possible semblance of embarrassment that a creature with a complete incomprehension of inhibitions and ethical boundaries can achieve. The tips of his ears, peeking out of his purple-black curtain of hair, turn a faint pink.

"If you say any of the three words life, is, or beautiful, in the same sentence, Princess Amelia," he warns in a suddenly malevolent tone, "I will vomit on your dinner."  
"Well, I…but Mr. Xellos, it was just so….paternal…and …saturated with justice…"

"And then I will make you eat it."

"But I was just commenting on…"

"With ketchup." Xellos's lip twitches as his smile resurfaces. "You are threatening to ruin my reputation as a bloodthirsty, godless mercenary, you see. I can't have that."

"Understood." Amelia looks a tad pasty. "It was just so daddy-like."

"I am not Prince Philionel." Xellos's lip curls. "I don't have enough body hair, for one."

"Unneeded visual reference," Lina remarks, with a shudder.

"But," Zelgadiss counters smugly, while Amelia's cheeks regain their peachy health, "bloodthirsty, godless mercenaries CAN conceivably be daddy-like in other venues of their lives. Yes?"

At that Lina brays with laughter, slapping Zelgadiss a high-five.

"Astonishing." Xellos slants the demi-golem a faintly wry glare. "Mr. Greywords, that is precisely the point that I have been repeatedly attempting to prove to the golden dragon elders."

"Not a bad point you're proving, I'll give you that," Zelgadiss smoothly retorts. "Nor, I'll say, are you doing a shabby job proving it. I'll retract my earlier assumptions about your…parasitism…of Filia and Val for the time being."

"Me too," Lina agrees.

"Me too," Sylphiel, fingering her long black hair, and Amelia, leaning her face on her hand, nod in unison.

"Thank you," Xellos chirps.  
"Kids really need night lights," Gourry blurts, emerging suddenly from a long, mute, airy haze.

Everyone stares at the potently blond man.

As is custom, Lina and Xellos recover first, nose-to-nose. "What?" They both chime.

"Well, night lights are what you leave to watch your kids when you're not there," the swordsman muses, stroking the canary-hued stubble on his chin. "I'm pretty sure that's what my mom told me when I was a little boy. Ages ago. Somethin' about how kids are so fragile, sucking everything in, not sure what's gonna hurt 'em, needing to remember someone's watching over 'em. I heard you gave Val a night light, Xellos."

"…Uh huh?" Xellos cocks an eyebrow and gestures at Gourry encouragingly. "And?"

"And it's not just that you GAVE him a night light, if you're really gonna come visit him every day till Filia gets better. If you do that for him…well…then it's more that YOU'RE his night light."

Xellos's jaw drops. "I. Yes. Well." The faintest of red tinges his earlobes again. "I'll…take that into account, Gourry." He clears his throat. Twice. He sits down. Then stands. Then sits again. Faintly, but incontrovertibly, there is a glint of satisfaction in his cat-eyes. "Yes," he adds more quietly, that satisfaction thawing his voice.

Nobody else knows what else to say. Zelgadiss is appraising Gourry quietly but warmly, as if he remembers something very admirable about the swordsman that usually goes ignored. Amelia is smiling, and looks like she might cry again.

Lina slugs Gourry on the arm, broadly grinning. "Well-said."

"What?" Gourry laughs quizzically at her. "Jeez, Lina, you're weird."

"No," she retorts, "your sudden brainwaves are weird. But they're cool too."

"So you ARE here," a new voice stained with disgust cuts through the moment. "I thought I smelled garbage."

The company looks up and sees Milgasia at the head of the table, fists clenched and trembling at his sides.

"Ahhhh Milgasia. That's Filia's line, not yours." Xellos makes no effort to hide the poison in his face. "The higher-ups tell me you're the next runner for Supreme Elder in this shabby little dungeon of a temple." He rises and begins to circle Milgasia like a hungry wolf.

"You were warned at the outer gate not to come closer," Milgasia spits, sidestepping the derision masked as flattery altogether. "What if the child sees you? The separation will be all the more painful when the other elders press me to kick you out once again."

"Your concern for MY child is touching," the mazoku leers, "but try as you might, you can't keep me away from him any longer. My presence will have to be tolerated daily, from now on."

"WHAT?"

"You'll see." Xellos smiles a cold, acidic smile. Then he straightens, and his smile changes. It is a smile that doesn't belong to a creature of darkness. "Val's coming," he announces, as though to say "the sun is rising."

Everyone turns and looks in the same direction that he points, down the hall.

Three seconds pass before Val rounds a corner, rubbing sleepy eyes and wearing a worn pair of pajamas that Filia bought in some discount bin before he had even hatched. A kindfaced dragon elder is ushering him forward and muttering to him about the need to apologize to his mother's friends.

But then Val looks up and sees Xellos. "Xel? XEL!" The voice is heartbreakingly joyful, and thick, and piercing, and tearful. The child careens forward.

Xellos's arms are already open. His face is calm, pleasant, accepting.

Val crashes into the mazoku who slaughtered thousands of his mother's race. He flings his arms around Xellos's sweet-and-spicy-scented neck and immediately bursts into tears. "I missed you!" he wails, over and over.

Milgasia's eyes change in that instant. They widen, and become clearer, somehow. Because Val is finally crying to someone.

"Hey, Val," the monster croons. "Hey. Shhh. Yeah, me too. Shhh. It's okay." He looks up and around the sobbing, clingling, precious little bundle, and pledges it, to Val, to his comrades in arms, and to the astounded Milgasia: "There won't be another day that I'm absent. Not a single day."

There is conviction in Xellos Metallium's voice.

And time will prove or belie it.


	5. Oranges and a Lock of Hair

**Night Light**

A** Slayers Fanfiction by "AmberPalette"/Amber S.**

**Chapter 5**

**Oranges and a Lock of Hair**

"It's not what you _are, _stupid, it's what you _do!" –From __New Moon, __by Stephenie Meyer, p. 307._

The seven-year-old girl feels hands on her neck, hands that are cold at first, long hard icy fingers probing her throat for a pulse. They pause over her throbbing jugular.

"It's alright," comes a voice. It sounds like a man's voice, above her somewhere. "Hold still."

It is then that the child becomes warm. Warm all over, warm like a thick wool blanket cocoons her, warm like a fire is ignited beside her. The warm seems to course through her veins, through her blood, like a hot bubbling liquid is injected into her. But she doesn't feel heavier—she feels like her body is shedding pound upon pound of weight, becoming intangible…floating.

The voice comes clearly now through the haze, the lightness of her limbs, the relief: "Are you feeling better now, miss? I bet you are." It's a strange voice, nasal, husky, dark—but twinkling, calm, all at once. It soothes her like a raspy lullaby.

"Y..yes…hurts…less…"

"You're about the same age as my son. He's five. How old are you? Six? Seven?" So very friendly. "You look about seven. You'll never guess _my_ age. I may _look_ like I'm in my twenties, but. Well." There follows a funny laugh, muffled, as if through the man's nose.

The little girl's eyes drift up and to the side. The face looming above her is as friendly as the voice. An angelic, boyish face, and a very calm smile, under very dark, very silky hair. And closed eyes. "Well, hello, sweetheart," the man adds quietly at her unexpected gaze, as if he can see her even with his eyes closed. His smile broadens, and looks like the smile of someone old, experienced, wearily wise.

The child feels strangely as if, in another situation, she should be frightened of this beautiful man. Because he is so beautiful that she should be dead or dying if she is seeing him.

But she is too exhausted to be afraid, too exhausted, even, to reply a second time. She frowns –her mouth makes the movement of a response, but one of those mesmerizing fingers rests on her lips. Her eyes close and the angelic vision fades, but the voice remains clear. "Shh," the man says. "There's no need. Sleep."

Such a congenial, soft voice. It is the last thing the little girl hears before she slips into unconsciousness.

"Where's m-mommy…?" she slurs.

"Somewhere safe," the man lies. There is a tightness to the skin around his closed eyes as he says this. As if her question hurts him. But the little girl is still too tired, and she falls asleep before she can ask the angel what is wrong.

She doesn't hear him muttering a word, a word that would make no sense to her, a stranger, anyway.

"Filia," the man with the old smile and the young face breathes. His eyes grow tighter still as he looks down at the little girl's hair. Long, thick, dandelion blonde hair.

"Done with dessert?" A contemplative alto voice glides across the scorched battlefield of the sacked town.

Xellos Metallium straightens his back, sitting up and away from the little denizen with the broken leg, burned face, and long blonde hair. His gestures are strangely contradictory—he pulls away from the child like both a glutton finishing a heavy meal and a doctor finishing crucial surgery.

That same tired old sage's smile remains on his lips as he opens his eyes and gazes at the little village in flames, and at the feast of negative energy that he has seeped from the many victims strewn across the ravaged huts and cottages. "I am satisfied beyond belief," he croons, resting his un-gloved hand on his stomach. But there is some irony, even some sarcasm, in his voice. He cocks his head at the female inquirer, with a dimpled quirk of his lip. "Is that what you want to hear from a monster?"

"Oh, peace, peace. I appreciate that you don't simply bask in hedonistic bliss at this kind of thing anymore, General Metallium." Luna Inverse, Knight of Ceiphied, tosses her lavender hair from her eyes—hard and bright, a deep murky maroon color, typically concealed by her bangs. She squats next to her ad-hoc ally.

Xellos's thigh muscles tense predatorily, but his smile does not waver as their eyes lock.

Between the Ceiphied-serving knight and the Shabranigdo-serving general, there is an almost palpable contempt. Yet Luna, like Xellos, remains rigidly civil as she continues.

"Your associate General Riksfalto certainly enjoys doing damage to seaside towns that refuse to submit to demon worship. It is good that your particular talent of benefiting your feeding hosts doesn't go to waste. You have become most useful. I am pleased that you responded so quickly to my distress call."

"Well, how kind of you. And trust me, Riksfalto is a half-wit, a disgrace to Lord Deep Sea Dolphin." Xellos chuckles, delicately sliding his glove back around his wrist. "She cannot have done all this damage, not even if Priestess Huraker were still around to help her. No, this is the work of my mother's minions. See the burns and slash marks on most of the victims? Those are the result of rather large creatures of the lupine persuasion. It seems she is in an ill temper because she has not yet acquired her new toy. Val Ul Copt. And I have a feeling you know that. I have a feeling that is half the reason you called me out here tonight, to discuss developments along that line of events. My mistress's insatiable greed for control."

"Wellll. A note of bitterness towards a daughter of Shabranigdo. Xellos, do you intend to turn maverick on the monster race?" Luna sounds obscenely delighted.

"Hardly." Xellos bristles microscopically, but his features quickly smooth. "My devotion to my mother has never been stronger. I simply return to that point of moderation—of balance, and compromise—in which all my colleagues and superiors, and all of YOUR colleagues and superiors, seem to have lost interest. Only humans seem to grasp that concept…black and white mixing to gray…perhaps it is why they endlessly fascinate me. At any rate…I do not see why Val must be preyed upon in order to prove my loyalty to the Beastmaster. He is happy the way he is. I should like to see him left alone."

"Hmm. You really ARE a freak of nature, a demon wanting to see someone happy with no personal gain."

Xellos's smile is angry and acidic. "My personal gain IS his happiness."

"Of course." Luna mirrors Xellos's smile. Her eyes are as one sided-mirrors from, on the inside, she peers. The view into her is blind, and it maddens Xellos, how she has stolen his hairstyle and his psychological tricks. But nothing maddens him more than the tone of skepticism in her voice.

He bristles again, begins to pace, eyes closed, his lovely, mysterious face pale with barely concealed fervor. He speaks almost without taking breaths, rapidly, feverishly, presenting his case as though it rests on the tip of a spinning pin:

"I care for that child, to the point that it startles me. Even in his former life, I knew that joining the monster race would be ill-suited to him. It was the closest I ever came to disobeying my mistress, when she ordered me to persuade him, and I knew the attempt to be futile. And now, in his new life, I see that what and who he is are precious. Don't you understand? VERY precious."

"Spoken like a true doting daddy."

"No, you don't understand. I MEAN this. They are… Pearls. Pearls of rare sincerity and sensitivity, and insight—the child is some kind of visionary, and he does not hide behind the…the hypocrisies of 'good' or 'evil.' I have polished and preserved those pearls. You see, he and I spoke about such things right before his mother was hurt. He took in all the truths of my existence, ALL of them, and chose to reserve judgment, to mull things over. He THINKS phenomenally, he perceives like a kaleidoscope. He does not SEE these blacks and whites the way most dragons do. It's not that he sees grays, either. The child sees COLORS. There is not a god or demon alive that couldn't respect that child for who he is now. And it CAN'T be ruined by diluting him, by…by pouring him into the big black river of mazoku that already exists and has no NEED for him. No benefits at all, for anyone! Yes, yes I care for Val. I want his happiness. YES, that ALONE would satisfy me, Luna Inverse. Or were you not paying attention?"

"Oh, you have NO idea how much attention I'm giving you, Lesser Beast. As I said, you're a freak of nature. You can rationalize all you want, say the only reason you're cross at Zelas is that Val is just not a useful tool to monsters anymore. Sure. You can wax poetic and maybe what you say of Val's character is very true, but you mistake me when you think I'm being facetious. I don't doubt your claim of affection. I meant what I said: What you are is a doting daddy. It's as simple as that—every daddy thinks his little boy is the most special in the world."

Xellos's face contorts with alarm and epiphany. "Does he?" But it's spoken too flatly to sound like a question. His eyes, which have betrayed his passion and turned a bloody crimson hue, snap cautiously closed.

"Absolutely. And that kind of thought process shouldn't even OCCUR to someone like you. Your interests are chaos and your religion is destruction. Hasn't my sister herself called you remarkable for your…heh…blasphemy? Your sentiments of love? And that's all I was getting at. Trying to get you to just openly confess it, that Val and Filia are your real priorities, despite your inexplicable continued servitude to Zelas. And just now, you as good as screamed the L word in reference to Val."

"Now, now, Dame Inverse," and Xellos lifts both hands, palms open, his smile morphing into a snarl-like sneer, "It's rude to talk politics and religion at the dinner table." His cat-slit eyes subtly warm from amethyst to ruby.

Luna notices, and is too tired this evening for a cataclysmic battle. So she shrugs, hand drifting away from her sword hilt. "Fair enough. So you also realize that this is not just about Zelas Metallium's concern over Val as a liability in the future? I mean, a MERE ancient dragon? A simple Dragon Slave could finish him off. Hell, at his age? A Fireball could do the trick, or an Elmekia Lance."

"I'd rather you didn't speak of my son as a casualty waiting to occur."

"YOUR son!" Luna hoots. "Oho! See? I was SO right."

"Yes. My son and Filia's." Xellos's face is placid, but his hands twist around his red-tipped staff. "Please don't forget it."

"Like I could. At any rate. Even with all his memories, clearly Val has no way of tapping the hybrid powers of his previous life in Gaav's servitude. He is no real threat. You realize, as I do, that, more than anything, Zelas is trying to remind YOU of your loyalties?"

"Of COURSE I do." Spoken a bit testily. "And as I told your sister and her comrades, I am more than capable of handling divided loyalties and I shall prove that very soon. Are we done here? I have somewhere to be by dawn."

"Certainly. Hey, do you smell that? It's like…a citrus scent."

"I'm afraid I don't."

"Mmm-hmm. Well. Tell Val I said hi when he wakes up."

A pause. "You're no fool, I'll give you that."

"Thank you."

"You're most welcome."

"You're a good man, Xellos." Luna grins fangily. "In a very weird way. It's the truth." She nods at the sleeping, content child near their feet.

"Ha, ha. So funny it hurts."

"You like pain. I thought I was returning a favor."

"Touché. See you round, Dame Inverse." And with the fizzle of teleportation, Xellos is gone.

It is late morning already, but Val has begun to sleep in. Here in the caverns, after all, there is no way of telling day from night.

The dragon child rolls over in his bed on the cold stone floor. It isn't so hard or chilly as it usually is. He sighs and inhales sweet smells…rain, vanilla, hard candy once you've started sucking on it…

Is Xel really here, then?

Val remembers yesterday morning. He remembers seeing Xel with his arms open, smiling, and the smile reached Xel's eyes, as it only ever does for Val and for mom. He remembers running into those arms, crashing into them, and crying and crying…but he remembers nothing more. Was it another nightmare, crueler even than all his memories of his former life?

Val opens his eyes and finds himself staring at yellow-cream fabric. The fabric rises and falls rhythmically with a warm breath that stirs the hair on the top of Val's head. Val yawns and looks around, and realizes he is wrapped not in his blanket, but in a familiar green-black cloak with Greek meander trim. He looks up into the same watchful purple cat-slit eyes that smile for him alone.

"Xel!" he exclaims drowsily, smiling back. With the simple salutation, and another yawn, he burrows into the mazoku's neck. There's a funny new smell there—like oranges.

It's that wonderful grating nasal voice that belongs to dad: "Morning, sleepyhead."

"No issnot." In protest, with yet another yawn.

The warm, soft bed which is actually Xellos shakes gently with rumbling laughter. "Yes it is, come on, you need breakfast. You've been sleeping for nearly 16 hours. Work with me here. If we don't get you to the kitchens, all of your elders will think I've secretly cursed you or something."

"Oookayyyy." The little boy rolls over off of the monster. "Where's my toothbrush?"

"I dunno, buddy, I just got back from work a couple hours ago." Xellos rises gracefully and glides past the stumbling, eye-rubbing Val into the wash room, a small, semi-circular indentation in the bedroom cave, where a dazzling glass mirror and a deep brass basin await. He is barefoot and it makes him even an more soundless, deadly predator than usual as he pads around the basin seeking his adoptive child's toothbrush. "Aha, here, you dropped it behind the…ahem. Well I wouldn't put it in my mouth."

An endearing hodgepodge of villain and "doting dad," indeed.

Val smiles through his disheveled bangs because when Xel is barefoot, it usually means he'll be staying longer. "Make me a new one."

"Make me a new one…?" Xellos cocks an expectant eyebrow.

Val sighs. "Make me a new one, PLEASE." He rolls his golden eyes, wetting his face at the basin, on his tiptoes.

"Certainly." Xel flicks his wrist and a new bright orange toothbrush materializes at Val's left hand.

"Nuh uh, purple's my favorite color now."

There is a pause, and Val turns and looks at Xellos, and at Xellos's brilliantly violet head, to see if the mazoku grasps the infinite import behind his change in color preferences.

Xellos is smiling a crooked, beaming smile and looking quite self-satisfied when he flicks his wrist again and the toothbrush changes colors. Apparently, he understands Val's meaning. "You're a sweet kid," he chuckles, shaking his head almost ruefully.

"That reminds me," the child ponders around a foam of toothpaste. "I smelled oranges when I woke up, why d'you smell like oranges, Xel?"

"Spit, for gods' sakes, you look rabid."

Val obeys, rinsing out his mouth. "Answer my question, Xellll."

"Don't whine."

"I'm NOOOT." Whinily, as Val wraps his tail around Xel's leg, and yanks on his yellow shirt.

"Release my limb, ruffian." Xel smirks, hoisting the boy up into his arms. "Whatever, not whiiii-nnnning. Heh. Clothing. Now."

"I am NOT givin' this up!"

"TRUST me, I know. But we'll get you to breakfast faster if you get dressed WHILE we talk."

"…Kay, that makes sense." Val nods approvingly, lip thoughtfully quirked.

"Of course it does." Xel carries Val back to the bed, and to a large chest where his clothes are now stored. He lifts out five dresses and quirks his nose at them. "Why is it that your mother makes you wear girls' clothing simply because it's easier to hide your tail?"  
Val brightens. No one talks about mom anymore, as if her invisibility makes it easier that she's severely injured. It makes him happy that Xel always still talks about her. "Well I dunno but I have some overalls in there too and I wanna wear RED socks! BRIGHT RED, kay?"

"Hmhmhm. You social deviant, you. Kay. Now," as Xel lifts out the overalls, "leg one. Good. About the oranges. Leg two. Attaboy."

"Yeah?"

"Your mom is wild about gardening, yes?"

"Yeah!"

"Well I decided on a whim a day or two ago, right before I came back and promised you I'd see you every day, to grow an orange tree in the back yard of the cottage for when you and she go home."

"REALLY?"

"Yep. It's uh. Rather sickly right now though. Kind of a wilty sapling. I'm not very good at creating, or, growing…or healing things…because of er well the fact that I'm a monster and my purpose is to make things messy and chaotic. SO. I was actually going to see if you'd help me out. Mind if I transport the sapling here and have you water it every day? I can cast a spell on it so it doesn't need the sunlight for a bit."

"Yeah! That'd be GREAT! But XEL! The tree's not here now. How come you smell like oranges still?"

"Well." Xel's ears are barely visible under his hair but Val can spot that they're turning a very pale pink. "Ahem."

"Why are you embarrassed, Xel?"

"I'm not." Hastily.

"Liar." Triumphantly.

"You're too smart for your own good, kid." Xellos picks up Val and begins to carry him down a long, dark, narrow passageway to the golden dragon temple kitchens.

"Thanks!"

"Heh. Well anyway. You know how I smell certain ways to people? Like good things, to ah make them trust me and draw them close?"

"You smell like rain and cinnamon and candy usually. It's real nice."

"REALLY nice, you mean. And thank you. Apparently, I've started to, er, give off the scent of citrus when I'm worried about someone. Because I've related the orange tree to my…concern…for your mother…and for you."

"Ohhh. I get it."

"Do you?" There is a touch of urgency in those purple cat eyes.

"Yeah." Val yawns again and nestles against the mazoku's neck. Almost unconsciously, he wraps his fingers around the closest strands of Xellos's hair. In the dark passageways it is a deep, almost black, violet, all of the rich other hues of magenta, lavender, and grape hidden.

They arrive in the kitchens. A testy-looking, saggy-faced dragon awaits holding a ladel. The mazoku's head tilts down to the left as Val tugs on his hair. The dragon chef, flabbergasted, takes it as a morning greeting, jerking his head in a return-greeting, but Xellos is actually coolly ignoring every adult dragon in the vicinity aside Filia and, by necessity, Milgasia.

"Why'd you do that?" Xel chuckles into the child's blue-green hair. His eyes flicker to his imprisoned locks.

"Because," Val explains quite factually, "if I have your head, then I have you. If I have you, you won't go away again so fast."

"Ahhh." This is all Xellos says for the moment, but Val shortly thereafter feels hands gently, reassuringly ruffling the black feathers of his wings, massaging the joints that connect to his shoulderblades. "I must teach you to fly soon," he mumbles, absently, too quietly for Val to hear at the moment.

"I hate the food they have here," the child remarks, feeling the full safety of the embrace now, trusting the person holding him to deliver happiness as though on an appetizer platter.

"I can just imagine," Xellos purrs back, with a dark chuckle. "I'll try to cook you something. Yo, hand that ladel over, Bob, er, Joe, er. Whoever you are."

Yanking the utensil out of reach, the dragon chef looks exponentially more alarmed at this suggestion.

Val does as well. He waves his little hands. "Um uh no, that's okay, Xel. Auntie Amelia told me how you lost that cooking competition in the haunted monster doll house that one time before I was born. She said your soup smelled like raw garbage."

"She did not! Your mother added that part, I just know it." Xellos grumbles.

"Well," and Val giggles, "mommy WAS standing there when Auntie Amelia told me the story."

"Hmm. Very well, I can't cook. I have the power of two high-level monsters, yet I cannot cook. O, the tragedy of the universe. We have arrived at a dilemma. Ah! But despair not, my child! I have a solution!" He turns Val around and hoists the little boy onto his back. "For a period of about an hour, I think I can keep you safely hidden from the dangerous attentions of the Beastmaster. Thus! We must go hunting. We must go out!"

Val squeals. "Cool!"

At this the dragon chef lets out a shrill noise and runs, limbs flailing, from the room, no doubt to warn Milgasia of Val's impending jailbreak.

Xellos just smiles serenely at the hysterically departing reptile's back. "Heh. His apron was ugly. So, whadda ya say to some ice cream, buddy?"

Val's limbs wriggle and he hugs Xellos's neck so tightly that, were he human, the mazoku would be gagging. "Oh my GOSH REALLY? I want three scoops! NO! FIVE!"

"HA!" Xellos barks. "Maybe two, Mister Red-Socks. When your mother wakes up and you have indigestion, she will subsequently flay me, draw me, and quarter me. And then I'LL be the meal."

"Ewww!" Val's nose wrinkles in delight. Then his face falls uncertainly. "Coz she…she IS waking up, right Xel?"

"Yes." The conviction in the demon's voice is rather forceful. "Yes, she is." And then smoothly, swiftly, his mood shifts to brighter realms. "So! Come on, two scoops, and there will be at least 64 flavors from which to choose. You must be hungry, my boy, and it will take a while to render such a grave decision as this. 64 flavors. Think of it."

"Wooow."

There is a tickled, jubilantly devious air to Xellos's voice as he announces "hang on," and teleports them both far from the caves of the Fire Dragon King.

That morning a pastel-walled Outerworld ice cream parlor is evacuated with a nasal male voice's false cry of "FIRE!"

Five minutes later, the empty building is set on fire and exploded by an exquisite circular fusion of lightning bolts.

But not before two tricky figures, an adult male and a little boy, have filched two entire cartons of coconut and green tea flavored ice cream out into the back veranda of the parlor.

The owners shriek and point in dismay, both at the debacle and at the thieves. But the adult male who cast the Dynast Brass spell smiles over his shoulder at them and waves, his congeniality oddly menacing. The little boy with him giggles, and sprouts a tail and black feathered wings.

They decide it wise not to press charges.

Fifteen minutes later, stuffed with a swirl of negative energies and half a carton of cold coconutty milk, Xellos Metallium and Val Ul Copt sprawl side-by-side on a sun-warmed stone wall.

The comrades in crime turn to each other and grin in lazy, boyish self-satisfaction.

"That was cool, teach me how to blow stuff up too," Val, sporting an ice cream moustache, commands.

"Well, first I've got some digesting to do," Xellos hedges, stretching luxuriously. "What a feast of frustration! Now I know how Miss Lina feels after dining on an entire pork roast by herself. Heh." He pantomimes cleaning his bright white fangs with an imaginary toothpick.

Val arches his back and loudly burps in agreement.

Xellos cackles and pats the child's full little gut. "Good grief, pardon you!"

"Thass the only good thing about mommy being hurt," the little dragon explains impishly. "I dun have to say 'scuse me when it's just you."

Xellos looks wickedly amused. "That's very touching, Val."

"It's the truth! You should try it too. She's not gonna scold you for it now, either."

The mazoku cackles again. "You are bizarrely logical for a child."

"G'wannn, do it!" Val titters mischievously, crawling with a comfortable possessiveness onto one of the most powerful mazoku in the known world. Xellos puffs out his cheeks comically, like a stuffed fish, as the child ruthlessly leaps up and down on his stomach.

"DO IT DO IT!" Val shrills, pumping his fists, still jumping quite enthusiastically. It is fortunate that the fullness of Xellos's belly is more ideological than literal.

At about the same moment, however, the mazoku relents to a decently gross belch. "Uhg, you're killing me, get off my poor stomach," he moans. "Pardon me, by the way."

"NOOOO! Don't ask to be EXCUSED, s'not COOL if you do THAT."

"I value my manners, thank you."

"Boo manners! BOO! That was a good one, though. Mine was louder, hee." Val flexes his nonexistent, pipe-cleaner arm muscles.

"Ahaha. Come on, heathen, back to the caves we go."

"What's heathen mean, Xel?"

"Something I like very much." Xellos grins like a Chesire Cat, wraps his arms around Val, and teleports them back to Val's room.

That was yesterday. Xel spent the whole day with Val, doing all kinds of fun, slightly naughty things, like playing pranks on the dragon elders. Elder Aldargia, the mean fox-faced dragon, threw a satisfying fit when he came into his bathroom only to find the toilet on the ceiling with the stalactites.

Xel left at bedtime, after giving Val the goodnight kiss on the forehead and humming a brief lullaby. "Got to go to work," he murmured in the child's ear, already invisible. "I'll be back tomorrow. You know my promise."

But today, Xel hasn't been here yet. Val is worried that he is hurt, or worse, that he broke his promise, the way the elders said he would. But Val won't ever totally believe them. He keeps waiting for Xel.

When it reaches mid-afternoon, Val grows restless. He stands and tiptoes to mom's room. No one has gone in or come out lately to dress mom's wounds, and Val finds that weird.

Val screeches to a halt in the doorway.

Mommy is still in her cocoon of bandages, in her hammock hanging from the ceiling. She is still asleep, and beautiful.

The difference is Xel has finally gotten into mommy's room, and is hovering over her. His hands are in her hair, endlessly smoothing back her bangs, and his face is very close to hers.

Xel doesn't know that Val is there, so he is talking in a normal quiet voice, and Val can make out most of what he is saying.

"I was thinking about people that are good and die young, Filly. Last night, I mean, after I left for Wolf Pack Island, to you know, check in with mother. Things are …interesting…there. Lots of double-entendres in our conversations of late. Don't worry, she still thinks I don't know where you and Val are. Oh, like you're worried, you're asleep, you contrary, stubborn thing. Hmm. Where was I?"

The mazoku kisses the tip of mom's nose. He smiles but his dimples don't impress into his perfect, smooth olive skin like they do when he is truly happy. He becomes very still watching mom, his bangs hiding his cat eyes. In that moment he seems to forget the illusion of breathing, he is so still.

He faces mom and Val looks at their two profiles and thinks of one of those black and white circles, with the dots, the yin-yangs, as the priests always call them.

Or like two pieces of a puzzle that are opposite but complementary colors.

Xel has purple hair, mom has yellow hair. One of Val's teachers once remarked that Val had good finger paintings in his art classes, because he always painted purple and yellow, and those two colors were complementary. Val just replied in confusion that he was thinking of his parents' hair, and didn't plan any big masterpiece.

Now Val thinks that mom and Xel ARE the masterpiece.

And he misses them.

Finally, when mom doesn't stir, Xel resumes speaking, and stroking her hair. Mourning his missing puzzle piece, his half of the perfect finger painting.

"Oh ah yes. Good people dying young, that's where I was. Now just heed me here, there's a point to this. Perhaps good people die young because they have already done all they can in this world. They have achieved a perfection necessitating departure for another, better world."

Now Xel leans in close to mom's cold, curved, pointy ear and nibbles on it. Then he kisses it very gently. Then he breathes, "You may think you're perfect, but you're not. So don't go anywhere. I don't care what you say. Never be perfect, Filia, you selfish thing. Never."

Val doesn't quite understand Xel's words. And they sound angry, and he is still smiling. But finally Xel's eyes are visible. And Val can see pain in his adoptive father's eyes even across the room.

Then Xellos looks up and spots Val, and up flashes his careful, eternal mask of happy calm. "Hey, Val. Didn't mean to keep you waiting. I've just gotten here and I wanted to say hi to your mother."

"Are you okay?" The child pierces the adult with his liquid golden eyes.

Xellos's face gives away nothing now. He holds up a finger, bends and kisses mommy's cheeks, forehead, and lips, very slowly, then strolls over to the keenly perceptive little boy. He hoists Val up into his arms and holds him a bit more tightly than usual. "Well," he says matter-of-factly, "you need me." And he says nothing more.

"But I…"

"You need me." More insistently. "So that's that. As frustrating as this will be, all I can say is when you grow up, you'll understand. You will."

"How d'you always do that?"

"Do what?"

"Smile no matter what?"

There is a pause, and then Val feels a dimple pulling up against where his neck is pressed to Xellos's cheek. "Practice," comes the quiet, enigmatic, emotionless reply. "A thousand years of it."

"Oh."

Xellos's fingers find Val's wings again, smoothing them soothingly once more. "Val, I don't mean to upset you, but I am afraid I can only stay for a few minutes today. My job has gotten a lot harder. My boss is looking for you still and in order to keep her from finding and taking you, I have to be away serving her a bit more…strenuously…than usual."

Though he understands Xel's selfless intentions, Val's whole world crumbles to dust at this disappointment. He squeezes Xel back, and immediately seizes a lock of his hair. "No," he whimpers. "Everything's awful here besides you. Everything stinks here!"

"I'll be back tomorrow."

"EARLIER."

"I'll try, Val. I am already trying."

Val falls mutinously silent.

Xellos sighs. "What can I do to make this easier?"

"Stay." Obstinately.

"BESIDES that. Something I CAN do, Val."

"…gimme a piece of your hair."

A pause. Xellos frowns, pulling back to look into the child's face. "Seriously?"

"Yes." Val sniffs and rubs his eyes. "So you'll come back for it later."

Xellos laughs, muffling the slightly psychotic cackles with his free hand when Val glares at him. "Oho, okay. OKAY, I said! But I'll be coming back for YOU, not the hair, buddy."

"Kay." Val opens his hands expectantly, still scowling.

Xellos grins. "You really do trust me, don't you? To just…do anything you ask."

The child nods stoically.

The mazoku gives another gleeful hoot. "So deliciously ironic. It's mutual, kid. It's mutual. Though, for the record? I'm not that way with much of anybody else. I'm kind of a selfish bastard usually."

"I know, but I still love you, so gimme the hair." Val wriggles with impatience.

"All yours." Xellos snaps his fingers and with the sound of thin scissors slicing, off drops a small chunk of his hair, on the left side, just below his ear. He makes a twirling motion with his thumb and middle finger, and a yellow satin ribbon ties in a bow around the hair. It drops into Val's hands.

"Thanks," the child says, with a breath of relief. "Now I got a piece of you."

"I'VE, you mean. And you already did, silly." Xel's dimples are quite pronounced now. "I have a couple of colleagues who are sure going to wonder what caused this." He wiggles the unsightly chopped-off chunk of hair. "I shall tell them it was a… mutant barking wolf spider…or a…schizophrenic hairdresser. Anyway. So, I'll see you tomorrow?"

"One more thing, Xel." Val assumes a business-like manner as he is put down.

"Yes?" The dimples fade slightly.

"Well, I. I. I want you to say I love you back to me. And since you can't say that word….I wanna think up a code word, like we did for 'dad.'" The child bares his fists and glares at the ground.

Xel tweaks his nose. "A sound request. Any ideas?"

"I thought maybe 'oranges.' "

"Oranges?"

"Yeah, coz. Coz you smell like them now, coz. You love mom and me, and are worried 'bout us."

"You're a disturbingly bright child. Have I told you that lately?" Xel bends over, the tang of citrus all around Val.

"Oranges, you weird and precious child of mine," the mazoku whispers, very clearly, in a light and playful and somehow fond voice.

He gives the boy his goodnight kiss on the forehead.

Then, with a whoosh of air and the sound of electricity, he vanishes.

But Val is clinging to that lock of purple hair, that piece of dad. And so, he is still smiling.


	6. Turning Point

**Night Light**

**Chapter 6: Turning Point**

"_Us against all creation? I like those odds!" –the Monkey King, from the Hallmark film "The Lost Empire."_

"Now, climb up there to the top of the orange tree, Val." An adult and teacher's patient suggestion.

"I'm glad you brought it here, Xel, it smells great!" A child and student's gleeful shrill.

"It's rather amazing how green it got after I brought it in your room." Xellos Metallium, demon of destruction, levitates easily five feet upward, as if swimming in air, and strokes his chin. He observes the young orange tree that he obtained for Filia Ul Copt—surmounted by their mutual adoptive son, Val. The child beats his equally youthful, fragile black wings as the adult muses, dimple-cheeked, upon the bark. "My word, yes, how firm it now seems in your abode, Val…"

"XELLLL!" Impatiently, the boy spreads his arms. "You're giving me FLYING lessons, remember?"

The mazoku's dimpled grin broadens. "Alright, little task-master, your wings are open and your stance is forward on one foot, correct?"

"Yup."

"Flap your wings very vigorously—that means hard—yes, good boy. Keep doing that. Then," and Xel tilts until he is backstroking in the air, "I want you to step off the top of the tree."

"…what?" Val's golden eyes register alarm. "I dun think…yet…"

"Never doubt yourself, Val." This Xel says almost sharply. "Never. It is good to be cautious, but _not_ uncertain. Think of this as when I taught you how to tie your shoes. Now, step off the tree."

The child looks down into the adult's eyes—familiar, inviting, a wickedly merry purple. He draws in a deep breath, flaps like mad, and steps off. Never once does he remove his eyes from those of his safe haven.

Dad is watching as the little boy tilts to one side, over-corrects, yelps, and plummets.

And so the mazoku catches the dragon hatchling, much as a net catches a hockey puck.

Val opens his eyes and sighs in relief. He giggles. "Oops."

"HA! Very good first try, Val!" Xel crows. "We will keep at it every day, yes?"

"Yeah, please!" Val chirps.

Xel chuckles. "Looks like it's not liftoff we need to fine-tune on you, as much as steering."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. And when we finally get you fully transformed to reptilian form, you'll REALLY be able to get going…"

"A-HEM." A pushy female voice makes them both gaze downward. Val yips and tries to make himself meld into Xel's yellow shirt.

"Ah." Xellos knows to whom he speaks before he even sees her—through his now-closed eyelids. "Lina. What an honor."

"Don't butter me up, you conniving bastard."

"Lina, you are always so flattering…"

" Luna dragged me over here for the week and I just wanted to say hi is all."

"How kind." Xellos lands, taking Val with him. The child scurries behind his surrogate father the moment Xellos's feet are planted on the rocky ground. Xellos suppresses a smirk at Lina, who is always shocked at Val's continued terror of her.

Then he turns and runs his fingers through Val's hair, while the child clutches his pant leg. "Go play in the kitchens for a little while….hey, you feel hot. Are you alright?"

Val peeks at him; his little cheeks are flushed and his eyes have an odd glaze. "Y-yeah." Then he looks away, as children do when evading the laser scrutiny of their parents. His tail coils around the mazoku's leg, per habit, nonetheless.

Xellos's face becomes very still and blank. "Okay. Go on. I'll be there in a minute and we can put laxatives in the elders' puddings again. Heh." He looks as though he is withholding something crucial behind the façade of mirth, but, from Xellos, this is nothing new.

Val nods, toddling off a bit unsteadily. It is difficult to say whether he looks more frightened or crestfallen.

Lina squints at Xellos, who has not really given her serious attention since she arrived, as if he is bird doo on a statue. "Okay, demon pie, what gives?"

"I think he's getting ill. I think that before he has bad visions of his past life, he gets sick to his stomach. Incidentally, as I ought to be watching him," and finally Xellos turns to scrutinize the diminutive redhead, his tone pointed, "what _was_ it you wanted?"

"Tsk tsk, Xelly-kins. There was a time you found me fetching and fabulous."

"You create chemistry with anything that has a penis, Lina." Xellos's fangs flash through his tight smile, even in the dim cavelight. "You are the most fun woman I've ever met, but I don't flatter myself that there was ever more than that between us. Nor should you. Your chaos is delicious and for that I am fond of you. Don't tell me you're trying to steal me from Filia while she's on her potential deathbed."

Lina's expression crosses crabby and becomes outraged. "How IS Filia?" she fires back. Garnet eyes, challenging another mistaken judgment of her intentions, meet amethyst. "Since that WAS what I wanted to ask you."

Xellos visibly cringes. "I apologize." The one eye that had popped open snaps shut again. "And I don't know. I would ask her elders, her physicians, as healing is a foreign art to one such as myself, but the only reason I can slip into this place is that they know they cannot overpower me. In every other way, they take great pains to make my visits…difficult. And it is taking a toll on Val's health. He is constantly frightened and it takes all the restraint I have not to kill all of those pompous bureaucrats who terrorize him right this instant." His voice has become a fine hiss by the end of this icy tirade; he levitates upward until he hangs upside down, arms folded across his chest.

Lina angles her head, peering into what part of Xellos's face is not obscured by his tumbling-down purple bangs. "Hurt and worry must be rollin' offa you like shockwaves."

"Ahah." Xellos is bemused. "How do _you_ know? You're not a mazoku. Lina, perhaps you should go attend to your sister…"

"Xellos, I've been there…" Lina begins.

The mazoku laughs, sharply, mirthlessly, making the brash, brave sorceress jump. "There was no child involved when the Hellmaster took Gourry from you. That you negate how very much the little boy in question changes this equation shows how young you really are. So, dear girl, please don't patronize such a world-wise old thing as I. Not until you're a parent."

Color rises in Lina's face—this is the first time that Xellos has actually openly expressed condescendence towards her. Contempt, amusement, flirtation, sneakiness, ruthlessness, all these, yes, but never condescendence.

She is not one to be scathed by the opinions other have of her, but Xellos delivers his judgment so coolly and scornfully as to make her feel that he has stripped her down to her linens and rid her of all her magic.

So, for once, she withholds a Dragon Slave for the spite of it, simply growls to herself, turns, and stalks off. "Whatever… Gourry's comin' up in about an hour with one of Milgasia's buddies."

"He's already here." The dragon elder's smooth baritone floods the cavern. He strides in, his white, ascetic's robes billowing behind him. He pauses, smiling weirdly at Xellos, as though straining to see through a foggy glass paned window. "You are correct. The boy is ill. He collapsed in the kitchens and he is being brought back as we speak."

Xellos yanks upright, both eyes wide and blazing red. "You really ought to curb that nasty habit of mindreading, Milgasia. And if you intimate that I am the cause of his illness…"

"No. Actually, I have no intentions of the sort. Amazingly, Lesser Beast, you are beginning to grow on me. After all, the child has asked for you every ten seconds since he fell sick. I am no idiot." Milgasia steps aside as a younger male dragon carries a pale, clammy Val into his cavernous bedroom. "Lina, come with me, your sister and Mr. Gabriev both await you in the atrium."

"Fine," Lina spits. "Feel better," she tosses over his shoulder as she stomps past the incapacitated Val.

Xellos streaks forward and seizes Val from the young buck's arms. He cradles him easily, like Val is still an infant, in the crook of one arm. "I knew you felt sick. What happened?"

"I threw up," the little boy whimpers, eyes jeweled with tears. "Then I saw myself tryinna hurt mommy and I fainted I guess."

And then Val shudders, rolls over in Xellos's arms, heaves, and gets sick again—all over them both.

A long and stunned silence follows. Lina and Milgasia gawk. The dragon elder appears ready to stride forward and take Val back from Xellos, who is sure to lash out in a fit of capricious rage.

But the monster lets out a little "ew, ugh," and then, a noise that is more appropriately crooning, gentle, and empathetic. "Val, it's okay."

"I'm sorry," the child is sobbing, shaking all over.

"No, no. NO." The last word is needle-sharp, as Xellos peripherally spots Milgasia approaching. "I've got him. You're free to leave." His lip curls at the dragon, and the human, spurning them both. "This isn't the first time Val's ever spit up on me, you know. I DID know him all through his infancy. And I think if I can lick a whole flock of ryuzoku, I can clean puke off myself." He chuckles, rubbing the child's back as he carries him to the bathroom.

Lina and Milgasia blink at each other. Lina shrugs, and leaves. Milgasia narrows his eyes. He catches threads of thought from Xellos in the bathroom. They are all disturbingly benevolent and paternal. So he sighs and follows the sorceress out.

Val moans, holding his belly.

"I know, buddy. I know." Xellos strips them both of their shirts, tossing the soiled materials in the bathtub. "Easy. Breathe."

"Don't go away tonight, Xel. Please."

The demon says nothing as he wipes the child clean with a towel.

"Please, Xel! I know you gave me a piece of your hair but my tummy hurts!"

"Val, what about Gourry—you like him and he's here for the weekend, how about I send him…"

"Nooo. YOU. Just you, Xel."

"_Xellos, I grow impatient." _A new voice, female, deep and husky, that of Xellos's maker, resounds in the mazoku's head. It cannot wholly be a coincidence that his loyalties are suddenly being tested by a divided summons. "_Your tasks today have built up in your strange and abnormal absence. You were spotted digging up a whole tree in that dragon bitch's garden today. She may die, she may live. Trivia! Sentimentality! Come home to your mother, my favored servant, and I shan't punish you for your tardiness." _

"…Mmm." Xellos's hairs prickle, his skin rises with goosebumps. His face betrays none of the fear he now feels. Every inch of him commands self-preservation.

And yet…

And yet… Val has crawled up into the demon's lap. He seizes Xellos's hand and puts it on his stomach. "Fix it, Xel," he mumbles, sleepily, with soul-shaking, vulnerable trust. "Coz I know you can."

Something buried under many charry dark layers of selfish predator instincts inside Xellos crumbles, withers, succumbs. He relinquishes—the decisions is already made, for better or worse.

Perhaps it always was made.

Perhaps he really is some kind of freak.

_Until you're a parent,_ he told Lina. What a weird, mysterious thing it is.

"Okay. I'll stay all night—just this once. Relax, hold still." He traces a finger in a circle along the child's navel, absorbing the nausea, the discomfort.

"Oranges," Val slurs, before becoming a slumbering pile of jelly in dad's arms.

"Yes," Xellos murmurs down at the tiny creature who is at his mercy. He carries Val to his bed.

Morning comes after an excruciatingly long period of darkness and worry. Xellos does not move from an impossibly still vigilant position all night. He has much that is foreboding to dwell upon. He has never directly disobeyed his mistress before. Never.

However, he hides his concern swiftly when the little boy stirs and wakes. "What's up, kid?"

Val smiles the way only a child feeling safe in a parent's arms can smile. He yawns and burrows against Xellos's chest. "I feel better now."

"I can tell." Xel's eyes are wry and knowing.

"I'm hungry." Val arches his back and stretches, head plopped against the great predator's firm, lean arm. Utterly unafraid. "I have a joke, Xel."

"Do tell."

"What's the tastiest cheese in the world to your race?"

"No idea."

"Muenster! Hee!"

Xellos blinks. Then he flings back his head and throws out an obscenely loud cackle. "THAT was AWFUL!"

"Heehee! I know."

"But I don't think we should feed you 'monster' cheese. Dairy products are hard on the tummy."

Val grunts and folds his arms across his chest, abruptly grumpy. "O-kayyyy…"

"But fear not, my..eheheh… little wheedler, I have a game we can play. Heheh…" Xellos is struggling not to laugh at the comically cranky look on the child's face.

Val jerkily brightens, and Xellos erupts into more laugher as the boy wiggles upright. "Yeah?!"

"It's, ahaha… it's called the pants game."

"The WHAT?"

"You heard me. The pants game. You think of a quote—something someone said, and quite randomly, stick the word 'pants' into the sentence."

Val blinks. "Liiiike…?"

Xellos hoists the boy upright, Val's back against his chest. He smirks triumphantly at the success with which he has deflected the child's thoughts from food. He speaks companionably in Val's ear, leaning them both back against the nearby bedroom wall. He tries not to dwell too much on the sunrise, and on his hazardous disregard of the Beastmaster's summons, as he quips, " 'To pants or not to pants. That is the question.' Heh."

Val giggles. " 'Eenie meenie miney PANTS!' " He shrieks out another giggle at this jubilantly nonsensical example.

Ah, the mind of a kid. "Very good! 'Red alert, Commander Riker! Don't panic! PANTS down, on the bridge! Everyone, I said, PANTS down!' "

Val applauds with more shrieking laughter. "I get it! Take off your pants! HEE!"

Xellos snorts. "That doesn't count!"

"Fine, you do better!"

" 'One PANTS to rule them all, one PANTS to find them, one PANTS to…er…in the darkness, bind them!' "

"HEHEHE!"

" 'The PANTS is afoot!' 'Clap your hands if you believe in PANTS! I do believe in PANTS, I do, I do!' "

Val is rolling around, off of Xellos, onto the bed, clutching his stomach and laughing almost hysterically. In the middle of his mirth, he seizes the mazoku around the waist and squeezes. "I love you, dad," he giggles, without thinking.

Xellos stiffens immediately. He looks around the room, as if suddenly expecting an onslaught of foes.

Val seems to realize his error. "I..I'm SORRY! D-did she hear me say 'dad'? I'm sorry!" Panic quickly rises on his face.

"No, no…" But the mazoku's tone is not entirely convincing. Quickly he hugs Val, gazing over the child's head, his own expression vaguely urgent. His disobedience compacted with Val's exclamation of dad will, together, compose a formidable music to face today. "But I think I'd better depart to do some damage control. Val."

"Y-yeah, Xel?"

"Stay in bed all day, you hear me? And no cheese. Nothing but Popsicles. Mmmkay?"

"Yeah."

"And Val?"  
"Yeah?"

"Please understand, if it were up to me, you could call me anything you liked. Oranges. I'll be back tomorrow."

And dad vanishes.

They meet in a desolate looking place—a single, floating bit of jagged land, tossed about by savage winds, empty, dark and cold. All is inverted: The clouds are black and the snow is black, the coal-dust of the fiery pits churning in the gorge below them is white. The rocky mountain peaks flash acid hues, and yet the grass peeking through the black snow is brown, dead. All is strange, all is wrong, to the living, physical eye.

This is the Astral Plane.

An enormous beast, a winged wolf with the fur of a midnight sky, shifts weight inside a throne-shaped crevice in the rock.

The throne is wrapped in several silken veils of rich hues, the topmost of which bears a woven black symbol of many strange crisscrossing lines, lettered in an ancient rune "The Demon Ipos."

All around this shrouded sanctuary is the potent odor of cigarette smoke, ash, and something sweet mingled with decay.

The great she-wolf emerges from her veiled cocoon. She pads up to her son, who does not turn and face her.

She sits on her haunches.

Her son, a beautiful violet-haired man, stiffens, but still he does not face her. He is slender, naked from the waist up, tattoos branded on both his arms and his chest. The marking on his chest, over his heart, matches the marking on the cove from which the she-wolf emerges. The only visible betrayals of his fear are the goosebumps along his otherwise unblemished arms.

He seems to anticipate more from the woman. He seems to be bracing himself. His face is blank, serene, accepting. He even smiles.

And the moment the she-wolf falls still, she is in motion again—twisting in a serpentine fashion, her limbs stretching and slenderizing, shedding their deep dark fur, her whole form pulsating red. She becomes a curvaceous human, nude from her transformation, luminous lavender hair cascading down her back. One eye is a murky blue, the other a pale, brilliant goldenrod.

Her dagger-slit pupils fall on the gently tanned flesh of her child's neck—a neck that looks fragile only to one with her magnitude of power. She places her crimson lips against that neck, in an act of seeming tenderness, as she speaks. Her lips must tickle the man's flesh, but he doesn't stir.

"Xellos, my precious child, you have disappointed me for the first time in your existence. I am greatly troubled."

"Milady, to disappoint you was not my intention. I beseech your pardon." Nothing on the young man moves except for his perfect, moist lips. He whets them, considering every word. "Humbly, I beg your mercy. I did not intend to neglect my mission. But I was detained."

"Detained how?" The woman's voice sharpens. "Do not mock me—be not ashamed of what you are! Take your TRUE form in my presence!" And as the great woman presses a long red fingernail against the man's jugular, he gives a jerk, grits his teeth, and dissolves into a quivering, inky whirlwind bristling with millions of razor-sharp, glass-shard masses.

"_I beg your forgiveness_!" the lilting nasal voice of the man comes from that whirlwind, only strained now, breathless. "Milady—you exhaust me…PLEASE…"

"YOU HAVE ANGERED ME!" the woman thunders, face contorting in fury. Lupine fangs drop from plentiful gums, distending her seductive mouth into something deadly. "REMEMBER, BOY: YOU HAVE NO CONTROL OVER YOURSELF WHEN I AM DISPLEASED WITH YOU! If I command it, no matter how much you have come to care for them, you will KILL them both. Yes, you KNOW who I mean, Xellos! _Answer_ me—was it not the dragon bitch and her sniveling brat, once more? How much more can you ask of me, that I bend for you, my son?! I can bend no further!"

She releases her grasp on the man's neck, and he materializes a human again, collapsing at her feet. The man retches.

"Please, Beastmaster…" he croaks, hair cascading forward in his sweaty face. "I was detained but a single night….I did not fail you by staying with the boy when he was ill…"

"Child, you are being so foolish." Zelas Metallium's intoxicating curls fall across her firm, bare breasts and thighs. Her beauty is staggering, and it is deceptive. She sneers down at her son, at his antithetical, threatening feelings of worry and love and agony, and she kicks him—in the face, and in the belly, turning him over. "And you dwell too much in this world of order and love, this living plane of dragons and humans and weak mortal creatures who feel so wastefully. Too much, my son. Your obsession with them is becoming unnatural."

Xellos Metallium coughs up the black, bilious liquid that is mazoku blood. "Don't hurt them," he splurts, around a mouthful of the stuff. "Please…you have my highest loyalty…please, they are no threat…don't hurt them…I have only ever served you, Beastmaster…" His voice is remarkably calm, and steady, aside the occasional cough, or tremor.

"I know that they are your favorite toys, my son. However, I also know that if they were no threat, you would not be pleading so fervently for their lives."

Xellos moans quietly, bowing his head to the cold, filthy ground, his external mirage of nonchalance cracking.

Zelas waits for a cruel interval before continuing. "Yet!…I will not kill them…no, not I. Another." The malice in her smile intensifies tenfold. "You make the mess, YOU clean it up. I shall give you a test, very soon. If you pass it, your Filia and her son need never fear my wrath again. If you fail, well…it will be on YOUR head, not mine, just a few more dragons slaughtered, just a little more dragonblood on your hands, nothing new to YOU, my darling child, IF you fail. In that sense….I think it is time I had you punish yourself, don't you?"

Zelas taps her long red nails together, click-clicking them unnervingly, like pincers. She cocks her head like a curious child.

For a split second Xellos has a wildly random memory of Val, diapered, plump, and barely three years old, barefoot on the dewy morning lawn under a tree, holding up a rich blue robin's egg, asking "_whassit, Xellos_?", and cocking his head in precisely the same way. Yanking on his pant leg, insistently. "_Issan egg like I was? Where do eggs come from, Xellos?"_ And Filia smiling at them, wearing an apron and looking ridiculous with baking flour all over her face. Filia giggling, thanking Xellos for his patience and attentiveness to the child, with her eyes alone. Filia, Filia.

And that is why he chuckles, gaze distant, up into his creator's face, even as Zelas bends over him, seizes his neck, and snaps her fingers.

"You'll not be laughing long, my son," Zelas leers. "Now…attack."

The Astral Plane is devoid of space and time, of cells, of air, as mortals know it.

For that reason, no living thing can hear Xellos's screaming.

Xel is late again, by several hours. Val wants to go flying again—he eyes the opening, the stream of clean sunlight, at the rock canopy of the underground dragon temple, longingly. He almost considers trying it himself. How hard could it be…? Val sprouts his wings, stretches them, and squints at the crack in the ceiling. He takes a step forward…

The crackle-whoosh of teleportation sounds in his room, far down the hallway. He gasps, eyes shining, and barrels for his door. "XEL?!"

The only thing familiar about the figure sitting on his bed, stooped over as though crushed by a burden, is its appearance—the purple hair, the black cloak, the eternally smiling face. But beyond that, Xel…isn't Xel.

His eyes are dull as though unseeing. His dimples have vanished. His hair is disheveled and his clothing is torn. And his face, a tapestry of green, black, and blue, is brutally beaten, one eye swollen shut. He smiles meekly at Val, who looks terrified. "Easy, kid," he rasps, around a cough, "it's not as bad as it looks."

A movement in the doorway behind Val—both mazoku and dragon hatchling turn to look. Milgasia and the Inverse sisters stand frozen in place at the sight of Xellos. For if a being as powerful as Xellos has been gravely wounded, it is worth an interrogation.

Luna recovers first. "Zelas?" she murmurs. "So she knows now?" Through her lavender bangs, her maroon eyes carry an alien trace of urgency.

Xellos gives a curt nod. "I don't know how she found out. But I answered for it, didn't I?"

"Shit," Lina grunts, wincing in empathy.

"Until you're a parent," Xellos repeats his saying of two days past, and this time Lina just nods, with emerging understanding.

Val cowers away from bogey-Lina, nestling against Xellos as gently as he can. "That's the lady who's your boss, innit?" he whispers. He touches Xellos's face, a green-murky purple bruise on his jaw, and when Xellos cringes, the child's eyes tear up. "She hurt you coz of ME? Coz I asked you to stay when I was sick?"

"You are worth it," Xellos retorts. His eyes open fully and burn with conviction. His lips are tight and thinned.

Milgasia stirs, looking gobsmacked.

Luna and Lina exchange incredulous expressions, and then both smile.

"Why'm I worth it?" the child sobs. "I'm not!"

"Yes, you are." Quietly, calmly. Xellos boosts his self-proclaimed son higher in his lap. "Val, you are."

"Why'd she have to…"

"I don't want to talk about it anymore. You musn't worry about it ever again." Xellos's voice is unusually firm, unusually fierce. "That's an order."

Val's little hands ball into fists and he inhales oranges, cuddling closer. "Does it hurt?"

Lina trails from the room, muttering something about food and how Gourry will take more than his share if she doesn't hurry.

Luna and Milgasia retreat to an unseen place in the room. Milgasia lingers, looking torn and confused, and Luna stares openly, her maroon eyes wan and perceptive.

"Honestly," Xellos admits, "yeah, a little bit." His eyes become weary, and he shivers against a sudden jolt of pain. "She made me attack myself with my own signature spells, as punishment."

Milgasia makes a disgusted noise in his throat, and Luna shrugs, glancing back at him. "Monsters," she mutters, as though this alone is a suitable explanation.

"I wanna help." Val bites his lip, wrapping his arms around Xellos's neck. He squeezes tightly. "Tell me how I can help!"

There is a pause, into which creeps an eerie and uncertain edge of malevolence.

The air itself seems to palpably change.

Xellos's face is considering, and then it is strange.

Not strange in the usual, enigmatic, smirking sense—strange in another way—a way that Milgasia, who watched him kill others ten times Val's size, knows well.

"Watch him," the dragon elder breathes in Luna's ear. "Something is wrong. He's flipped over into…YOU know…"

"I know, I feel it too." The Knight of Ceiphied's hand flies to her sword hilt. "Zelas has done something more to him than just bash him up…I don't think he's in control of himself…I don't think he even realizes it…but look how he's shaking…"

"I smelled something like citrus a few moments ago," Milgasia cuts across her with a hiss. "It was so strong, it had to be some kind of magic, but now it's going away. That seems significant somehow…What's happening?"

Luna presses a finger to her lips. "We'll see."

"Oh, yes…you can help me…" Xellos's voice is quite unnatural. It is hollow, hungry, and it shakes as much as his body now shakes, with the air of some kind of junkie. He wraps his arms around Val's fragile waist, turning him roughly over so they are facing each other. "GODS yes, you can help me! I am SO hungry, Val…I have been SO hungry ever since your mother was injured…" His eyes are open too wide, and they are glazed. He licks his lips at Val.

Val frowns back, puzzled, not yet afraid—trusting wholly.

Xellos arches his back, rearing up like a serpent. "No, w-wait," he suddenly mutters, and his weird, craving smile falters. His grip loosens slightly on the child. "Not him…"

"Xel?" Val cocks his head in that sweet, naïve way.

The mazoku looks thrice more troubled. "Just a little…won't hurt him…NOW…" Abruptly, his voice is high and cold, and female—it is not his voice at all, but a woman's. "Do it now…" He appraises the child through quivering, long, thin fingers, fingers which clutch his gray-tinged and bruised face. "It will hurt less…if you eat a little bit…feed…do it now…do it NOW…"

Luna swears, stepping out from her watching place. "And I thought I'd work a few extra tips at the diner tonight," she mumbles, sword aloft.

"Do WHAT now, Xel?" Val's face registers uncertainty and mounting fear. "You don't sound right…" He begins to wriggle in his adoptive father's grasp.

Xellos's clutch goes iron. "YES, I am HUNGRY," he keens, eyes maddened, empty, crazed. "I don't care, AHAHA! All that mattes is me and my survival…No, I…I'm sorry—you'll forgive me—just a little, no crime—you'll forgive me…she's making me…she's making me…" If monsters could cry, Xellos might be crying right now. His voice is just as frail, as pleading, as hoarse, as if he were. His smile grows ever more depraved as he concludes, "You'll forgive me, HAAAHAHA, I'm hungry! One more dragon is all!"

Val is sobbing. "_You're not my Xel_!" he howls. "_Let go, I want my mommy and I want my XEL!" _

"The Beastmaster's taken over his body!" Milgasia, with his penchant for obvious declarations, bawls.

"SHIT!" Luna bellows, charging. "You're right! HEY, ASSHOLE! HEY! XELLOS! STUPID! WAKE UP! That's your son! YOU told me that—YOUR son! You're going to kill YOUR SON! Zelas has you OUT OF CONTROL!"

Xellos recoils at the approach of the Knight and dragon elder. Rage, the predator's resentment at being interrupted mid-kill, twists his lovely face, eyes bleeding fully red, irises and whites and pupils disappearing—all of it red.

He flicks his wrist and a potent beam of Lord Ruby-Eye's energy blows Luna and Milgasia off their feet.

Greedily, Xellos turns back to the wailing, struggling hatchling. "HOLD STILL…" He seems to be commanding and begging at the same time. He thrusts off his gloves and cups his suddenly icy hands around Val's streaming face. "It will be tasty," he whimpers in ecstasy. "At last to feast on your nightmares and your weaknesses without the dulling of a humanitarian agenda…I don't care, I am a monster, why should it matter if I k…"

And he falters.

"If I ki…kill…"

His eyes become more frightened than Val's.

"Kill you…wait. No wait. Something isn't right here." Suddenly, Xellos's voice is absurdly calm and logical.

Clarity returns to his eyes. He gasps and retracts his hands from the child's rapidly paling, draining, blank face, as if Val's skin will burn him.

"No. Val? No. I'm not that hungry. I'm n…No. I am never that hungry, mother." Now Xellos speaks familiarly, in his precise, logical, husky voice. HIS voice, no one else's. "I said _never_."

He looks strangely triumphant, and then he doubles over, collapsing on the floor next to Val. He clutches his chest, fingers scrabbling at the place where, were he human, his heart might be. He gives one last shudder then falls still. "Yeee-owch," he muses, voice muffled through his mussed hair. "That's what I get for 'passing the test,' is it? Heh. Come, now, mother."

The pause that follows this declaration is the kind that is recognized as the eye of the storm.

Luna and Milgasia rise sorely, exchanging flabbergasted, wary gazes.

Then comes the eruption.

An earsplitting shriek, a howl and a deafening roar, in all their heads, coming from no one in the room: The spirit of Zelas Metallium's rage at having been defeated. All four of them clutch their heads and gasp.

"Very well, my child," comes a growling, grudgingly admiring voice. "I am impressed." And then Zelas's spirit leaves the dragon sanctuary, and it is gone—gone back to the Astral Plane, for good.

"Well," Xellos announces hoarsely, managing that idiotic and endearing smile. "That's that." He wipes sweat from his bruised forehead and salutes Luna, who looks amused, and Milgasia, who looks so infuriated that he can't coherently reply.

Then the mazoku blinks, face alarmed, recalling the person for whom he had just titanically struggled against his own innate urges.

He peers at Val, precious Val, crumpled in a trembling fetal ball on the floor by the bed. The child is still sobbing.

"…Hey, buddy…" He curls himself around the knotted-up ball that is Val, petting the child's aqua hair.

"Is it r-really YOU this time?" Val chokes, pulling away.

"Yes. It's really me. Val, I apologize. I had to fight very hard not to give in. I suddenly became hungry for some negative feelings, you see…" Xellos's hands have traversed down Val's back. He is stroking the child's wings as one might stroke the back of a cat, or the head of a dog—softly, rhythmically. "…because a mazoku in pain can only heal by feeding on negativity. I thought it would be the same as always. I would eat your bad feelings and you would feel better….

"But then I realized that my mistress was speaking, and acting, through me, trying to prove to me that I would always obey her, no matter what…trying to get me to hurt you far worse than I would if I simply ate a little of your fear or worry…but what she cannot really understand is the promise I made you way back before your mom was injured."

Val peeks up at the man he calls father. "That you'd never hurt me?"

"Yep. And I passed the test. She can't ever make me hurt you now." Xellos fingers that spot on his chest at which he clutched when Zelas left his body, but he does not yet reveal what connects that spot to his words.

"So you got hurt again for me?"

"You are worth it," Xellos repeats, matter-of-factly, even airily. He shrugs.

"…Oranges, Xel," Val sniffles.

"Oranges," Xellos replies, looking very satisfied.

"You have got to be the weirdest family I've ever heard of," Luna chortles, sheathing her sword.

Milgasia remains mute. In the dragon elder's emotional journey from horror to rage to relief, his face has gone from red to purple to a natural color again.

"What REAL family ISN'T weird, Dame Inverse?" Xellos purrs, collecting Val into his arms again.

"You've got a point there, daddy," Luna concedes with a fangy grin.

At the title of "daddy," Xellos looks mildly queasy. But when Val rises up on his knees in the mazoku's arms, and hugs him tightly around the next, Xellos does not push him away.


	7. The Father Disowned

**Night Light**

**The Father Disowned**

_"Where has my heart gone?_

_An uneven trade for the real world_

_Oh, I, I want to go back to_

_Believing in everything and knowing nothing at all."_

_--Evanescence_

"That is not possible. The bruises I have made you give yourself have addled you. Or maybe it's that dragon girl and her child. But I tell you, what you claim—it is not even conceivable."

"My Beastmaster, it is."

"Lord Ruby Eyes does not make mistakes, Xellos."

"My mother, it seems he has."

"Xellos. You are blaspheming now. And I do not wish to dispose of you."

"I should prefer to avoid such a course of action myself, milady. Heh."

"Do not say that. Do not make light of annihilation. Don't smirk! You cannot wish to survive forever, not truly, if you are a monster."

"But that is precisely the crux of it, mother, annihilation is not…"

"STOP. You must refrain from further discussion of this matter. It must be as if you never spoke of it."

"I am compelled to speak, milady, for all things are compelled to act on behalf of the person who gave me this knowledge."

The Greater Beast tilts her gaze to the side, expression flat with indulgence and tedium. Her voice is soft and cold—sleet on a glass pane. "Who?"

The lithe, purple-haired male ducks his head sharply. His body follows suit, in a small, poetic flourish of gratitude. "I have spoken to the Supreme One, the All, the Source, he who shines like gold upon the Sea of Chaos."

Zelas Metallium scoffs sharply. "Oh, Xellos, this is too much…"

"Milady, I beseech your attention, for this truth is so very crucial to the balance of our universe." Xellos literally wrings his gloved hands. An alien strain covers his lovely and eternally young features.

A sigh. "My pragmatic child, you are not usually one for superlatives, so I will listen. Go on."

"Beastmaster, I myself have been honored beyond comprehension and have been lent a secret by the Lord of Nightmares. There is no other, none who would gain from our emancipation of Lord Shabranigdo—to deceive us and take his power. No, that is not the danger at hand. Rather..."

A dramatic pause.

Zelas growls. "Speak before my temper is again lost."

The servant's two eyes snap open. Slowly, he unfastens the three top buttons of the long black robe that he wears before his mistress.

"Before I go on…Behold my sincerity, mother. Branded by your own hands onto my flesh, whenever I take this physical form. Even my eternal bonds to creatures whom you despise are plainly marked on my skin for your witness. Even things that cause you revulsion I openly tell."

His eyebrows lift for emphasis. Then he continues.

"Therefore I can deceive you in no possible fashion. I cannot lie to you—nor am I willing to."

"…This is…" The mistress traces her own rounded lips with a bloody rouge nail. Then she reaches out and taps the markings on her priest-general's chest—markings which have subtly changed. Her touch is like a feather from one of her wings.

The servant forgets to breathe in his anticipation.

Finally Zelas speaks. "…True. This is true. Speak. And do it quickly. Once again, I will listen, my clever pet."

"My mistress…it is the very end goal of Lord Shabranigdo's emancipation that must...humbly do I serve as messenger when I say this...that must be called into question."

The servant holds up both hands and bows very low to his creator, all but groveling. Inwardly, he roils with delight that he has earned a captive audience, and the danger itself of speaking so boldly is a thrill to him.

This is a precious secret to Xellos Metallium.

A secret he has held within himself ever since the Fibrizzo campaign.

A secret that has enabled him to do things wholly unnatural to a demon and a monster.

A secret that has liberated him to make love to a dragon priestess, to come back from the grave to be with her for eternity.

A secret that has allowed him to cuddle against her long after their lusts are sated, because of something more felt between them, something tender and spiritual— their two bodies like warm, pulsing puzzle pieces snapped into place.

A secret hat has led him to the bed of her adoptive son at night, to sit down on the edge and quietly read a book to the boy, soothing him to sleep after a nightmare.

A secret that has justified his earnest need to return again and again to that little boy, and keep him safe and happy.

A secret that has allowed a demon to love.

"Milady," Xellos repeats, to wipe away any possible communication breech. "Milady, Lord Shabranigdo has mistaken the ultimate goal for which monsters exist. The secret I was told is the precise nature of his mistake."

Beastmaster Zelas Metallium lets out a gasp—the first sound of true horror, and shock, in her existence. _"What?"_

Lesser Beast Xellos Metallium speaks as though panting, voice a thin whisper. His eyes are wide and they brilliantly gleam. "When I retrieved the Overworld maoh Lord Darkstar's weapon, the Gorun Nova, for the human Gourry Gabriev, the Lord of All lured me into its retrieval by promising me this great secret. In return, I am to persuade various factions of this world to help prevent the sort of devastating losses suffered by your brother, Hellmaster Fibrizzo…to prevent the…forgive me…trifling interventions that they necessitate, on the part of the Lord of Nightmares herself. Therefore, milady, I will readily give the secret to you..."

He holds up that familiar hand with index finger.

His mistress appears ready to combust as if she is made of mixture of vitriol, gasoline, and charcoal, and he has just lit a match at the hem of her white robe.

Still Xellos pauses, luring, ever luring, before finishing his sentence:

"…by asking YOU a very simple riddle...milady will readily discern the answer, I am sure."

Zelas leans over her prize creation. Cascades of lavender hair, scented of incense and potent cigarette smoke. She takes his face in her hands. Her own expression is strangely rapt. "Ask, then."

Xellos is elated with this turn of events. He begins to discuss his great secret in exquisite detail.

He forgets the time.

Xel has never been so late before. Never.

He is six hours late, and Val is so bored he could scream.

But Val is good at entertaining himself. So he climbs out of bed, washes up, eats a tepid breakfast of thick honeyed oatmeal, and pads around in his bedroom.

He thinks of the day Xel first taught him to tie his shoes. He wonders why Xel never got impatient with him, when he was even younger and his tubby fingers couldn't seem to work that one tricky loop at the end. They must have sat there in mom's vegetable garden out behind her kiln for hours, tying and tying for hundreds of tries.

Then Xel had said something about "Velcro," and how it would be all the rage in about five or so centuries, and not to worry if he didn't get it right for a long while.

Then, while he and Val laughed about this alternative option, Xel took Val for ice cream.

So where is Xel now?

Val considers taking the lock of hair out of the shirt pocket where he always keeps it, and waving it around and shouting Xel's name. Usually, that is an effective way of summoning his dad.

He fishes in the breast-pocket, pleased with his own ingenuity.

"Alone, are we?"

Val's stomach curdles. He knows that voice. It's the voice of the fox-faced elder, the particularly mean one. He glares way up at the adult, who smiles condescendingly back.

"What?"

"Where's your...heh…father?"

"I was just gonna callim," Val retorts, with a pugnacious bristle. "He's a real important general and a priest too. He's real busy sometimes."

"I know precisely what Lesser Beast Xellos Metallium is, little boy. You are the one who does not. And the correct use of the word is 'really,' not 'real.'"

Val's cheeks redden. Somehow, when Xel corrects his grammar, it's not nearly as embarrassing as this guy's remark. "I'm gonna call my…Xel now."

"You do that. I'd love to see. Indeed, to believe it, I shall HAVE to."

Val feels this is some kind of test. He swings the lock of purple hair, braided through with a yellow ribbon, high above his head. "XELLLLL!" he bawls. "Where ARE yaaaaaa?"

Nothing.

Seconds pass. Minutes.

Still nothing.

No Xel.

Val's heart plummets to his feet. This has never happened before. Never, not since he hatched—before that, the boy suspects. Never.

The fox-face elder laughs cruelly. "Impressive devotion. Typical of a monster, my boy. Typical. You know…it's too bad your mother hasn't much improved the past month. It's a pity she'll never see you fly."

Val tastes something bitter in his throat—bile. His heart does gymnastics. "Whadda you mean by that?"

But the elder is already sauntering on down the cavernous halls, past Val's room.

Val turns and looks up at the top of the orange tree that sits in the center of his room.

Xel put it there. Surely Xel wouldn't mind if Val tried to fly by himself.

Xel never actually said not to…

Not exactly…

And Xel isn't here. And Val is mad at Xel for that.

Val begins to climb the tree. He reaches the topmost branch and he begins to flap his wings…"vigorously," that's the word Xel used last time…

Then everything gets confusing, because it goes so fast.

Val feels a presence, something surrounding him, and his nostrils sting with a sharp tang of oranges. There is a bright flash of light, and the sound of a wind tunnel, and locusts, and electricity, and the feeling of lots of little pieces of something collecting and fitting into place against his skin, and then suddenly Val is being tightly clutched from behind.

The oranges get stronger still.

"_What are you doing?" _The voice is familiar, and at the same time it isn't. It is Xel's voice, but it is so sharp, so fierce.

Val immediately knows he is in trouble. The scenery of his bedroom changes. The floor rises up to meet him as he slowly billows to the safety of the ground, still held in Xel's arms.

But Val is old enough now to know that the best defense is a good offense. "_Where were YOU?"_ he snaps back.

"Don't change the subject."

"Don't leave me alone so long."

"Val." A warning tone, exactly like that Filia preparing to scold her son, except in a male voice.

Val grimaces. He's never heard dad scolding him like mom does. "That big mean elder was being mean and he said mommy wouldn't see me fly…"

"So you decided to go climb that tree and jump off, and crack open your skull when you fell again?"

Xellos doesn't look angry, as much as blank, and very very cold, and his smile is tight and too-patient.

"How d'YOU know I'd fall this time?"

Xellos towers over the hatchling. He looks now like someone who was in the thralls of a very enjoyable chat with a kindred spirit at a coffeehouse…before Val ran over and knocked a steaming pot of coffee in his lap. He is wearing something different than usual today—a long, single-piece black robe with many silver buttons. It looks cold and ominous and Val hates it.

"How?" the mazoku in black purrs. "Because I have a thousand years on you, kid, and I think I know just a TAD more when it comes to pretty much EVERYthing."

"Why are you so mad, Xel?" Val's voice shakes.

"Because you SCARED me. Because I can't turn my back on you for a couple of hours without having to rush back here and make sure you haven't DIED."

"Well…well I d-didn't…" Val backs away to his bed, crawls up on it, curls up, knees to chest, among his stuffed animals and toy trucks. "I…" He resorts to a whining tone.

It backfires.

"QUIET," Xellos hisses. "I am doing my best to take care of you and you're making it MUCH harder. I was detained because I was talking to my boss. And it was about circumstances surrounding YOU. Do you have any idea how hard it is to negotiate your safety? Every day? DO you?"

Val is still mad at Xel for not coming when he called. It makes him think of how mom is still lying asleep in her cocoon. It makes him feel angry and lonely.

Val is tired of feeling guilty and not knowing why.

Something inside him becomes very hot, and fills him up. He has to let it out. He seizes the lock of hair that didn't work, in his breast-pocket, and hurls it at Xellos.

There is a pause, while Xellos blinks down at the token he gave his son, then goes pokerfaced again.

Then Val takes _his _turn sounding furious: "So you're…you're sick of takin' care of me, huh?"

Xellos continues to stare back blankly, apparently perturbed that the child is capable of being angry with him. He also looks like he is frantically thinking for a retort, but Val keeps shouting.

"Y…You're just a big mean know-it-all," he snaps. "You're only being nice to me to score big points with mommy! You don't really wanna be my dad."

"How can you possibly think that?" Deathly calm falls over Xellos like a blanket of snow.

"Coz it's obvious! I _miss_ mommy."

"I asked you if you _really_ knew what a mazoku is, what a mazoku does and needs. Clearly you have no idea what I've given, against my nature…what I was negotiating today for _your_ sake…"

"You SHUT UP and STOP BRAGGIN'!" The child is throwing stuffed animals and books and plates at Xellos. " I WANT MOMMY! NOT YOU! MOMMY! MOMMY would be _NICER_ to me—"

"Stop throwing a tantrum. _Stop_. Your mother is _not here_. I_ am_."

"SHE'S NOT DEAD YET! SHE'S NOT DEAD!"

"I _know _that, Val, you think I'm not keeping track too? That I'm not scared shitless too?"

"I DON'T CARE! SHUT UP!"

"You think I'm always as calm as I look? Eh? Smiling means _nothing_, Val."

"SHE'S NOT DEAD!"

"I _know_ that." Extreme patience, as Xellos gnaws self-calmingly on his lip. A rare color is rising in his cheeks, both eyes open and blazing ruby. "I meant I'm the one who's capable of…"

"SHUT UP! Stop talking! I DON'T CARE IF I GET HURT! YOU CAN'T STOP ME!"

"The POINT," Xellos cuts across the child's frightened, guilty excuses, "is that I have sacrificed more for your safety than you could _fathom, _and here you go, risking your life, being _reckless_ and _stupid_, threatening to throw yourself away and _hurt _your mother and me more than either of us could _bear_. How _dare_ you, Val? I can pardon, and I can stomach, _any_ foolishness, _any_ wrong, aside THIS._" _

The ensuing silence is seething and acidic as they stare across the bedroom at each other.

Xellos is the first to break the crackling stare-down. "I could kill you. Anytime I wanted. But. _But._ '_But' _is such a crucial thing." His voice is quite conversational. He turns to face the wall.

The smell of oranges grows fainter.

"_You don't love me anymore_!" Val screams, as much in rage as in fear—rage at a broken promise.

"What gave you such a _foolish_ idea?" Now Xellos whirls on his son. "How could you believe those _tight-assed lizards_?"

The child is stunned to see a matching, red-faced fury in the usually placid, masklike visage of his father. Nothing in the mazoku's voice, simply curt, betrays this fury.

But Xellos must see Val's terror now, because his features quickly drain of emotion.

"You've stopped loving me because I don't smell oranges!" Val still manages to toss back. He points a little finger viciously at the monster. "You say sorry! YOU SAY SORRY!"

"I have _not stopped_. And if anyone should apologize, it's _you_." Xellos's voice is still barely more than a whisper, but the continued curtness stings sufficiently. His hands are balled into fists.

Val halts. He doesn't understand. And he has never seen Xel unsmiling for this long. Val is bewildered.

Xellos takes advantage of this, with a surge of frustration, entitlement. "YOU apologize. For giving me all _this_." He points coldly at his many bruises and cuts, care of his mistress Zelas. "All this." He yanks up his black sleeves, revealing still more gashes and blue-black skin stains. "And this too." And he unbuttons the middle of his robe, and there are still more marks of agony on his stomach and ribs.

Val draws in a sharp breath, as though physically slapped. His eyes are wide, incredulous, as if his deepest secret fears have been brutally voiced by the man he sees as dad.

And perhaps they have been. Anger clouds the mind. Even the mind of a very wise mazoku priest.

And Xellos continues, so cold, so ruthless. "Yes, you. YOU should apologize. For making me _care _so much about you and your mother. For SHACKLING me for eternity because I care SO GOD DAMNED MUCH, wholly against my own reason and will. And I was actually HAPPY for you two, for me WITH you two, earlier today, when I was, oh how did you put it, 'late, and not with you,' because I was talking it over with my creator, FOR YOU. You are UNGRATEFUL. Apologize."

"I HATE YOU!" Val shrieks, without hesitating. Tears stream like drizzling rain down his alabaster cheeks. He has stopped listening for several moments now.

"Good. Makes my life much easier." Xellos's face again acquires chilly fury. But his voice never rises, nor does he lift a finger against the child. He merely stands glaring down at Val.

After a moment his face turns blood red again, as if fevered by the effort of restraining his rage. His smile returns on the end of this blush, but it is not any kind of smile that Val recognizes.

The nonresponse makes Val teeter uncertainly. He opens his mouth to repeat the declaration, but his eyes become vague. He kneels down at the unmoving adult's feet and rocks back and forth on his haunches.

Val is not there anymore. It is hot and dry. He is tumbling down a sand dune. He has bloody blisters and cuts of his own. He is tall and lean, and his aqua hair is long. His wings have sprouted, but one of them gushes red, half-severed. He is a teenager and he is alone—behind him an endless field of ancient dragon corpses, heaped like great stinking black mountains.

He is alone.

Then the man is there, the man with the long red hair, the mazoku hybrid called Gaav.

He speaks words of revenge and survival, of living against all odds, to Val. He embraces Val. Runs him through with his sword. Cold merciful steel that rebirths Val powerful and painless, proudly horned. A force to be reckoned with, protected and praised endlessly by his new master. Valgaav.

Valgaav had a father.

Val doesn't.

Val is still alone.

He is yanked from his reverie—the fierce mazoku with the purple hair and the dimpled smile is holding him now like a ragdoll.

All of Xel's anger is gone now, as he looks down into Val's face, eyes searching and almost desperate, and opens his mouth to speak:

"Val." It's all Xel says. Like a precious incantation. Like a secret promise. So quiet and so soft.

Val replies the first thing that comes to his mind—meant for other people—dead and dying, traitors. "I HATE you."

Even though Val has already said this, a moment ago, in a rage, Xel flinches visibly this time. Val feels powerful, being able to hurt Xel back so efficiently.

Xel seems to have moved past Val's hurtful claim, at least for the moment. He tries to put his hands on Val's head, to usher out the pain, to anesthetize him yet again…

But he is not dad, _no one_ is dad, Val doesn't deserve a dad, Val doesn't need a dad, Val doesn't need help.

Val is angry and tastes almonds and charcoal in his mouth.

"YOU'RE NOT MY DAD! MY DAD'S DEAD! MY DAD'S DEAD! YOU THINK YOU CAN BE MY DAD BUT YOU'RE NOT!" He struggles viciously.

"Val." Xellos says it again, the child's name, the same gentle way. And nothing else.

He reaches insistently for Val's head. And then, "Please."

"NO! DON'T TOUCH ME, GO AWAY AND DON'T EVER COME BACK! I'M NOT VAL! MY DAD WAS GAAV AND HE'S DEAD!" Val rips himself free of Xellos, whose face is strangely tight and pale. And he runs away.

Xellos stands there watching the precious, precious child, the pearl, the visionary, the sweet imprinting duckling, vanishing down the corridor of the dragon temple.

He stands there staring after Val for a very long time, eyes hidden in his purple hair.

"Oh…that kind of hurts." He says it as though it is a curious observation, an unexpected and unpleasant epiphany. His hand clutches the left side of his chest.

A strange shuddering sigh drops unheard into the dank air before Xellos teleports into oblivion.


	8. Awakenings

**Night Light**

**Awakenings**

_"The book of love is long and boring  
No one can lift the damn thing  
It's full of charts and facts and figures and instructions for dancing  
But I  
I love it when you read to me  
And you  
You can read me anything  
The book of love has music in it  
In fact that's where music comes from  
Some of it is just transcendental  
Some of it is just really dumb  
But I  
I love it when you sing to me  
And you  
You can sing me anything  
The book of love is long and boring  
And written very long ago  
It's full of flowers and heart-shaped boxes  
And things we're all too young to know  
But I  
I love it when you give me things  
And you  
You ought to give me wedding rings"_

_--Peter Gabriel_

It seems to Milgasia that the Lesser Beast is unusually attentive to his clothing today.

Xellos Metallium wears newer, blacker garb—the same plain hem with Greek meander as in the past, only with his tunic, gloves, and boots having joined his cape and pants in their dark hue.

One other difference exists: Xellos's three red orb brooches have been replaced with a single bright gold pendant. The pendant features a sun with a woman's face in the center. It is embossed with the letter L, and endless tendrils of hair.

His only explanation for this is a sudden and fortuitous promotion at "work." Yesterday his teleportation into the temple brought with him a palpable miasma of smugness at this so-called promotion. But today, there is something almost burdened about Xellos.

The mazoku peels his gloves, a murky purple-black, on and off of his long-fingered olive hands. He relates to Milgasia the contents of his argument with Val the previous afternoon, voice a hypnotizing drone. All the while, he never takes his eyes, open but strangely drooping, off of the gloves that he continuously removes and replaces.

It is almost like a nervous gesture.

Milgasia stares at Xellos's hands, unable to look away from the demon's rhythmic gesture. He realizes with a wash of wonder that they are the most beautiful hands he has ever seen—impossibly smooth, unblemished, the knuckles even and firm, the nails perfectly manicured, neither masculine nor feminine—simply beautiful. He blinks, realizing that Xellos's tone has gotten more emphatic.

"Milgasia, are you even listening to me?" There is a more familiar trace of edgy amusement in the monster's voice now.

"…I apologize. Yes." The dragon elder's eyes snap to Xellos's face. Milgasia feels a flush of shame in his cheeks at once again so openly gawking at the exquisiteness of his mortal enemy.

If that is even what Xellos is, anymore. Milgasia is no longer sure.

Word has traveled from Luna Inverse. The Knights of Ceiphied have heard of Zelas Metallium's sincere current intentions to leave Filia, her son Valteira, and the rest of the Golden Dragons in peace.

It is strongly suspected that Xellos—with his recent "promotion," and his demonstration of devotion to Val even upon severe temptation—has something to do with this.

"Xellos, who is the lady you wear around your neck, and to whom you show some new allegience?" Milgasia asks this point-blank. He is almost defiant, exhausted of feeling one step behind the mazoku.

"That, for the moment, is a secret."

"Of course it is." The dragon sighs, rubbing his temples.

"Don't be vexed, old, heh, _pal_." Xellos's lip quirks, and his eyes drop back down to his gloves. "There are more important things right now. How is Val today?"

"He has not resembled a living child since you and he argued."

To the dragon's surprise, the mazoku sharply flinches. "Please explain."

Milgasia sighs heavily. "He won't eat, he paces his room all night, he won't even speak, all he does is stare at the wall in his room. He won't visit his mother—he says it's 'too late,' when I ask him why not. He has stopped crying again as well. I am worried. Xellos…whatever it is you did for him before, you must do it again. Soon."

"He won't let me touch him." There is something vaguely raw to Xellos's voice. He clears his throat. With his gloves losing interest, he moves to a hole in the wooden table at which they sit, and traces it endlessly with a finger. "Therefore, I can't absorb his negative energies and alleviate his burdens. I have, in essence, failed him after all. It makes it difficult for me to look at _her_."

And the monster nods at the body suspended in a white bandaged cocoon, dandelion blond hair cascading down, the sleeping form of Filia Ul Copt, only twenty feet away in that same room.

"I don't think it is just your peculiar talent for benefiting the hosts from which you leech that helped Val these past many days. I think it is something about you that is more profound than that." Milgasia's ore eyes burn. "It is whatever made you a _father_ to him. Try and find it, and help him again. Or have I mistaken you, a nervous parasite who gives up at the first sign of conflict, for the terrifying demon general who slew thousands of my formidable race?"

Xellos glares directly at Milgasia for the first time. "You've made no mistake, I assure you." His eyes are bright red. He smiles and the redness dims back to amethyst. "And fortunately for you, your blatant baiting style is working. I shall rise to the challenge."

"Good." And this is all Milgasia says, and then he smiles, genuinely, at Xellos, for the first time.

The warmth is not lost on the mazoku, who appears thoroughly amused now. "I do hope they make you their next Supreme Elder. You, like my Filia, seem to have some kind of a brain of your own after all."

"It has been decided, and is certain. I assume the mantle of Supreme Elder on the next full moon."

"Well, Milgasia. Perhaps you and I should go paint the town red and get roaring drunk in celebration of our recent career successes."

"Perhaps." Milgasia's smile is now the epitome of dry.

And then Filia moves, and lets out the faintest of groans.

Xellos is a sieve through molasses. He is across the room in a time shy of milliseconds. He rockets into the air. He hovers over the face of his perfect jigsaw puzzle half, snaps off a glove, and holds his palm to her mouth.

Milgasia trots over and stands beneath them. "Any changes?"

"_Quiet_," Xellos hisses, umoving.

Milgasia is too stunned to object. He has never seen the infamous, dragon-killing monster so…open…before.

Yes, open. Xellos's mouth, his eyes, the rising blush of his cheeks, all seem to bloom, to spread wide, in candor and wonder. Even his feline pupils dilate until they almost seem round. He resembles a child that first perceives an incredible taste, or a brilliant color.

This must be what the experience of hope looks like on the face of a demon.

But moments of inertia on the slumbering Filia's part spread, as well, like a black ink stain on a white cotton cloth.

Finally Xellos sinks, blank-faced, back to the ground. "Well."

"It is better than nothing."

Xellos's smile, when he lashes around to glare at Milgasia, is bitter. "Oh, _is_ it?"

"Xellos…"

"Don't you _dare_ tell Val. It will crush him, if this comes to nothing—to know that he missed seeing his mother in her last moment of consciousness."

"Your pessimism will drain that child…"

"My _realism_ will _protect_ him."

"Xellos, I understand…"

"Are you in l…luh..llluuuhh…" The mazoku physically trips as though on a rock jutting from the floor. He clutches his chest, going pasty. He gestures at the dragon to finish the word that, as a demon, he is bound never to utter.

His stammering over the forbidden word is such a racket that neither man sees the woman in bandages moving and murmuring to herself again.

"No, I am not in love. Nor have I ever been." Milgasia's features acquire a rueful weight. "Nor, I suspect, shall I ever be. Not like you are, with she." He nods at the still-sleeping fair-haired girl. "You have become an aberration of your species. It is…I believe your Beastmaster called it 'impressive.' Speaking as someone who saw you at your brutal worst, I must vociferously second that remark."

Again, Filia moves.

"The point is, you never have been. So you have _no _idea." Xellos is merciless in his disappointment and frustration, though his voice remains cold, snide, as ever. "You do NOT understand."

Milgasia acquiesces fully this time. He lifts both hands in surrender. "Alright, Xellos. I suppose I don't."

Again, unseen, Filia moves.

"And I do not understand how the child feels. I shall try, but I don't know how to help him through this, anymore. For the first time in my thousand years, I am _powerless_. How does one numb oneself to such pains, Milgasia?"

Milgasia has nothing to say to this. He stands gawking. He shakes his head once, from one side to the other.

Filia moves again, still unnoticed.

"I didn't expect you to have an answer. Good afternoon." A lit match might turn to ice against Xellos's voice. He sounds a little hoarse, though the strained smile remains, as he stalks from the room.

He gets one hundred feet down the dank and jagged-rocked hallway before there is a most undignified, baritone-pitched whoop of joy.

His shoulders hunch. Slowly, he turns. Something more complicated emerges on his blank face. "…please…" he breathes.

Milgasia is running—barreling—down the hallway, his robes disheveled. His face is animated almost beyond recognition, and he is gesturing wildly back at Filia's recovery chamber. He has shed all decorum, perhaps for the first time in his over-2,000 years.

There is a pull on the mazoku's navel. A pull like an electrical livewire has been plunged down his throat and into his belly, like a fire in his icy core. A hook compelling him undeniably back towards the room from whence he came.

Xellos Metallium has seen and known almost all things conceivable. In some ways, he approaches omnipotence. Yet only once before has Xellos Metallium experienced this particular sensation. Volatile, passionate, chemical, spiritual. Like recognition.

It was the day he first laid eyes on Filia Ul Copt.

"Please," he mutters again, inexplicably. And he frowns at his own nonsensical words, the same words he uttered to Val, when desperate to alleviate the child of his suffering. His feverish, suspenseful gaze never once leaves Milgasia. His hair is messy from suddenly turning, some of it in his eyes, his slightly ajar mouth.

The dragon elder stops two feet from him, arms stiffly at his sides. Milgasia's expression cannot now be mistaken for anything but elation. "Her room," the dragon elder breathlessly explains, "her room—go! AWAKE! Really awake! I—the others! I will inform the others! GO!"

Xellos has already passed him—but mentally, somewhere in his own full-blown, manic bliss, he reminds himself to go easier on Milgasia from now on.

The door is insubstantial as he flings it open. The space between him and his perfect opposite, his soul mate, is laughable—seconds, less than seconds, will be sufficient to conquer that space, and hold her.

And hold her he does.

He has to remind himself that dragons are physical and not astral bodies, so that he does not crush her. He perches on her cocoon and lifts her up into his arms. Though Xellos Metallium is a master of self-control, a little involuntary gasp of "oh!" escapes his lips, through Filia's thick yellow hair.

Filia squirms a bit until she is comfortable, and then, feebly but ardently, she holds him back.

And then they are both still for ages—minutes, hours, time becomes inconsequential in the moment of reunion. Filia's eyes make Xellos's tunic very wet. He does not seem to mind.

"Foolish girl," at last the quirky nasal voice of the dragoness's demon lover comes muffled from her tangle of hair. "Foolish dragon, I suppose you think I would have been fine without you, heh. What a she-lizard you are."

Filia makes a strained, petite sound of protest in her throat, and smacks Xellos on the arm. Her head remains resting contently, safely, on the chest of her dark lover.

Xellos laughs, and it is a funny, tremulous laugh, different from any other he's made. "Whatever did I do to deserve you, Filia Ul Copt? Thanks for waking up, all the same."  
But they keep holding each other, because though Filia has no idea what else has happened in the past months, she knows Xellos has just told her that he loves her.

And how she adores him in return.

When Val runs into his mother's arms, many hours have passed, in order to allow her to gain enough strength to sit upright.

Xellos sits behind her, propping her up with his body, his cape wrapped around them both like a shawl. Filia leans back against her mazoku periodically, dozing when too spent. She wakens with a grumpy scowl each time he tugs on her tail, kisses her, and naughtily giggles. Were she any less frail, she would probably be decently embarrassed at his antics.

Any unwitting spectator of their tender entwinement might melt into a crooning puddle at the way that Xellos seems to find his returned lover too delicious and precious to stop touching in some way, even for a few moments. His speech is somehow more buoyant, with the bright and bubbly cadence that they all realize has been muted of late. He almost seems careless in his quiet bliss.

And to Luna, Lina, Zelgadiss, Sylphiel, and Amelia, there is a lifted weight about Xellos's features, a weight they didn't even realize was there until the tightness of his eyes and the slight snarl on the bridge of his nose finally vanished for good.

To Gourry, for some reason, this all seems totally expected.

The dragon elders allow this public affection with some consternation. Milgasia, for his part, remains carefully impartial with his facial expressions. It seems Filia isn't the only one who did some awakening today.

Filia cannot speak yet because of the savage throat injury that she has sustained, necessitating an arduous process of relearning speech—almost as if she has had a stroke. However, she can think as sharply as a tack already, and she notices with some bewilderment how Val refuses to look Xellos in the eye.

She kisses Xellos's throat to get his attention. This extracts a half-sarcastic chorus of "awws" from Lina, Luna, and Zelgadiss, and a most sincere chorus of the same persuasion from Amelia, Gourry, and Sylphiel. Even Amelia's graciously endowed sister Naga, who had been visiting Saillune for the first time in years, is present. The buxom lady flings back her dark head, trumpets a gurgling giggle, and applauds the two total strangers. She rather reeks of alcohol.

Xellos shivers slightly at Filia's kiss, clearly long-missed, and beams at her. The faintest trace of pink emerges in his earlobes and cheeks.

Filia's concerned expression drains that pinkness swiftly. She nods urgently at Val, who is curled up, mutinously silent, in her lap.

Everyone tenses slightly, because Xellos's eyes have regained tightness. "Yeah, about that." He laughs and it sounds not amused, but hollow, and sad.

Filia glares at him openly now, ever the protective mother. Her cornflower blue eyes flash.

"I botched things with him," Xellos blurts, oddly incapable of his usual deceit. "I really messed up." His smile fades. "I let him bait me when he was angry and afraid, because _I_ was afraid as well, and I said inappropriate things. He has every right to never look at me again." He shrugs, making them both sway a bit in the white hammock. His eyes fall closed in an ingrained gesture of self-preservation.

Filia turns urgently to the suddenly sober company. Clearly flabbergasted by Xellos's extreme, uncharacteristic harshness upon himself, she seeks confirmation.

"That's correct," Milgasia purrs.

Filia sighs sharply, flinging up her arms in her first vehement gesture since awakening. She shakes her head and looks away from her lover.

Xellos seems to sink into the hammock. Bizarre as snow in July, he seems genuinely abashed.

Val remains stiffly coiled in his mother's lap. His glare, through his aqua hair, only gets harsher.

The company gaze at one another. Luna gives Lina a meaningful look. Intimidated into giving her two cents, the sorceress hems and haws. "Er…well ya see, Filia…Xellos here…"

"You know…" Amelia's tinkling soprano slides into the awkward silence, saving Lina the trouble. "He was really doing well until yesterday. It's kind of ironic, Miss Filia. We all tried to see if we could take care of Val months ago, when you first were…injured…by that demon from Wolfpack Island. Val wouldn't have anything to do with us. The only person he wanted to be with besides you was Mister Xellos. And Mister Xellos…well he…" Her eyes brim with the tears of an extremely histrionic teenaged princess.

"He rose to the challenge admirably," Zelgadiss rumbles, with his usual terse summation of complexities. "The boy was happy. Truly happy. They were inseparable. Whatever has changed between them has been extremely recent and is probably easy to fix."

Val stirs uncomfortably, hiding his face in his mother's robes.

Xellos now resembles a statue, expressionless, immobile, absorbing what is said, secretly, like a sponge. His hand goes to his chest, to his heart, to something there that has changed, hidden under his clothes. Then he touches the new sun-woman pendant around his neck, and frowns, as though some math problem he had been so confident about now seems to add up incorrectly.

"Xellos is Val's night light," Gourry suddenly contributes his serendipity of months past.

It's this last remark, this perfect metaphor, that makes Filia stir. She gazes at Gourry, suddenly wholly convinced. Her eyes fill and then spill over. She nods.

"Yes, he is." It is Milgasia who agrees with this statement aloud.

Dragon elders and humans alike turn to gawk at him. Even Xellos blinks.

Milgasia just smiles back. He chooses to focus on the fox-faced dragon elder when he cooly adds, "It is merely a fact, Aldargia."

"…Yes, Supreme Elder Elect," Fox-Face reluctantly consents.

Filia's eyes spill tears again. She is smiling radiantly. She strokes her son's hair and tries to sit him upright, and turn him towards her, towards Xellos…

But Val stands and suddenly dashes from the room. His eyes are still dry.

Xellos watches him go. He clicks his tongue. "Oranges."

Skeptical eyes now turn on him. "What the hell?" Lina grunts.

"Nothing," Xellos breathes. "It's just that he'll have to do a lot of…a lot of running…to shake me."

Xellos gives up seeking out Val when, every time he ducks his head in the child's room, a solid object is flung at his head. A master hunter, he knows when it is best to retreat and lure the quarry by remoteness.

To keep from being inappropriately emotionally distraught at this current rejection—at least by mazoku terms—Xellos keeps busy. He helps the healers to teach Filia to walk again. Days pass and she begins to form words again, even short sentences.

It helps that Xellos still knows precisely how to push his lover's buttons, and to irk her into a necessity to speak her mind. In fact, her first words, when he pinches her hind-side in front of a bunch of older male elders, are a raspy and slurred, "Y-YOUUU…PURRRRPLLLE B-BASTARD!" Of course, when he whoops, picks her up, twirls her, and kisses her, her anger has already evaporated.

That's kind of the way that Xellos and Filia work. And they love it.

Nevertheless Xellos remains cognizant of his exile from his son. Never had he expected such an exile—one imposed by Zelas, perhaps, by the dragon elders, absolutely. But now, when all other barriers are broken, it is Val who erects the most daunting of all.

Frequently throughout the day, Val crosses paths with his father, but the child refrains from speaking or making eye contact.

Perhaps the most painful reminder of this exile comes when Filia is paid a visit by her long-estranged, widowed mother, who has finally caught news of her injuries.

Xellos has left Filia's bedchamber with their empty teacups, to get more water, when he runs into a very tall, very thin, and very blond woman with prominent, pointed ears, clad in royal purple and gold robes. Oddly, the purple of the robes almost match his hair.

The woman scowls and Xellos almost gasps at the familiarity of the expression on the much older, more wrinkled face. "Who in seven heavens are you?" she snaps.

"I er…" Xellos's shoulders shake. He is trying not to laugh. "My apologies, I didn't know Filia's mother was still alive." Vague dismay surfaces on his face—he thought he had the upper hand on his adored dragoness, and knew everything about her. Wrong again. Maybe it's what makes her such an endless delight to him. He pulls himself together with a cordial smile. "She's awake, if you want to see her."

"What do you do?" The woman is still curt.

His smile becomes fangy and broad. "I am a priest and a general."

"Of the Flarelord?" Her expression is now dubious.

"No, not exactly."

"But of an exalted being?"

"Heh, oh yes." Xellos works a blooming smirk back into sobriety. Lord Shabranigdo probably qualifies, loosely, as an exalted being. Just…not to ryuzoku….

"…Why does such an esteemed individual come to visit my daughter?"

"I'm her…" Xellos pauses. "…husband." Mentally, he plans to milk Filia for all she's worth in return for this favor.

"You…?" The woman looks him over. She has harsh, unforgiving features, and Xellos realizes now from where comes Filia's panicky sanctimony and rigid pride. To his surprise, something inside him quivers with pity for the strict, closed-minded childhood his lover must have experienced. "You are not a dragon," Filia's mother finishes.

Xellos smiles tolerantly. "No."

"And you, though not a dragon, are her child Valteira's father?" Confusion surfaces on the woman's thin, fair face.

Xellos pauses, and the woman frowns at the distant pain on his face. "Well." His eyes shift, then return to the face of his company. A dimple emerges on his left cheek. "In my book, yes. I am Valteira's father. But it is up to Val, in the end, and no one else, whether he will have someone like me for a father. Whether HE will adopt ME, that is."

He awaits the inevitable next question, but it never comes.

Filia's mother merely nods, then, abruptly, as though it is a muscle spasm, she embraces him. "When my daughter disavowed the priesthood, I disowned her. But I can see how worthy a path she has chosen instead!"

Xellos cannot help but chuckle at this irony. "Thank you."

"The child is troubled…"

"Yes. I made a mistake, an error in judgment, and I didn't watch him closely enough to prevent a very strong…traumatic memory. Val is adopted, you see. His father, before Filia was his mother, was a…complicated…individual. It's not that the man was unkind to Val. Rather…he made Val believe, and do…things that no one as sensitive and…compassionate…as Val should be forced to do. It…wounded something profound in the child."

"But…I thought Filia had custody of the child since he was an egg…"

Xellos winces apologetically. "I think," he says, "that this is a topic which, ultimately, you should discuss with your daughter alone."

"I see." Filia's mother nods, eyes downcast. "We have…a lot to catch up on."

"That's alright." Xellos grins. "Let me tell you a secret, Mrs. Ul Copt. We're all entitled to make mistakes on occasion." He winks. "Don't tell anyone."

"You are a sweet boy," the woman tearfully sighs. She dabs at her eyes with a handkerchief.

Xellos shakes again with silent mirth. "Ahaha, well," he replies, voice trembling, "if it makes you happy to think that, go right ahead."

"Join us, won't you?"

"…later, perhaps. I have something that simply must be accomplished, something that must be…corrected…right this instant." Xellos cocks his head and flashes a cheerful grin, before the air shimmers and his form dissolves to another location in the subterranean dragon temple, in search of Val.

Xellos scours the entire temple for Val, with whom he is determined to make amends. The child is nowhere to be found. The demon's stomach twists with that alien panic that he felt only once before, at sight of Filia lying on the floor of her cottage soaked with her own blood. He is not sure what he will do if he finds Val in the same state.

He circles back to the kitchens, knowing Val to seek a jar of peanut butter and a spoon when the child feels deeply depressed.

This time the coldness of the place is palpable. Xellos slinks to the door of the walk-in icebox, a very dark and arctic cavern in the kitchen wall. The door is open.

But even then, it is hard to conceive of the room being this cold from that source alone. There is an alien presence, some sort of intruder, in the kitchens.

The Lesser Beast's throat rumbles with an instinctual, wolf-like growl. His eyes flash open and blaze crimson.

"Oh, very good, Xellos," comes a high, soft, and sleet-like voice. "This hide and seek game was even shorter than I expected."

And then a sleek woman, with an endless braid of thick midnight blue hair, and cat-slit eyes the color of harshest emerald, emerges from the ice box. Her movements are terrifyingly graceful, a female counterpart to the dance-like, savage poetry of Xellos's physique. Her armor is tight, blue, pointed, and gleaming. One hand rests on the hilt of the lesser demon that poses as her sword.

The other arm is curled around the torso of Val: pale, shivering, and petrified.

"Xel?" the child squeaks—finally looking at Xellos, finally reaching for him.

"Put him down, Sherra." Somehow Xellos's voice sounds civil, despite the fact that his jaws now support a distended row of razor fangs, his eyes resemble ruby-hued diamonds on their sides, and his posture has become a menacing forward-crouch. A voice just like that of a gentleman at High Tea. "Now."

"Make me," Dynast Grausherra's general coos.

"You've got it," Xellos chirps—preparing for the kill.


	9. Fight, Bleed and Fly

**Fight, Bleed, and Fly **

_"little child, be not afraid  
though rain pounds harshly against the glass  
like an unwanted stranger, there is no danger  
I am here tonight_

_little child, be not afraid  
though thunder explodes and lightning flash  
illuminates your tear-stained face  
I am here tonight_

_and someday you'll know  
that nature is so  
the same rain that draws you near me  
falls on rivers and land  
on forests and sand  
makes the beautiful world that you'll see  
in the morning_

_little child, be not afraid  
though storm clouds mask your beloved moon  
and its candlelight beams, still keep pleasant dreams  
I am here tonight_

_little child, be not afraid  
though wind makes creatures of our trees  
and their branches to hands, they're not real, understand  
and I am here tonight_

_for you know, once even I was a  
little child, and I was afraid  
but a gentle someone always came  
to dry all my tears, trade sweet sleep for fears  
and to give a kiss goodnight_

_well now I am grown  
and these years have shown  
that rain's a part of how life goes  
but it's dark and it's late  
so I'll hold you and wait  
'til your frightened eyes do close_

_and I hope that you'll know..._

_everything's fine in the morning  
the rain'll be gone in the morning  
but I'll still be here in the morning"_

_--Vienna Teng_

Xellos Metallium crouches forward, arms slightly extended at his sides, still as death. His eyes are open, drinking in his prey. Only his mouth moves. "Last chance, Sherra. Give the child back or I'll attack you."

"Misery is roiling off this hatchling like ocean waves." The most frightening thing about General Sherra Grausherra is her utter impassivity, coupled with soulless determination. Her voice is the best manifestation of this terrifying match, next to her visual appearance: a drawling, relentless monotone, high and cold. Her tongue slowly curls around each syllable as though slipping around a wet icicle, memorizing its smooth surface. "Xellos, do you enjoy his malaise?" She smiles a weirdly keen smile down at the child wriggling under her arm, particularly weird coupled with her dead voice. Her poisonous jade eyes glisten like green fire encased in sleet.

Val whimpers, grimacing. "I'm sorry, Xel," he forces through his little white fangs. "I'm sorry, don't hate me!"

"Val, it's fine—just give me a minute." Xellos's eyes shift in his otherwise motionless head. He speaks through a determined smile.

"Yes, don't apologize, hatchling," Sherra drawls. "You've alleviated my…boredom."

"I never took you as someone who entertained trifles, Sherra." Xellos can match his peer for coldness, but not for colorlessness. Every word he speaks lilts with carefully composed venom, smugness, and malice. It is enticing, lethal, like him.

Nevertheless, Sherra appears unimpressed. "This is no trifle. I am _not _here to idly poke a stick in the cage of the Lesser Beast, the aberration, and his contrived little family. I am here on orders."

"Oh?" Unstable giggles emerge as champagne bubbles in Xellos's throat. He takes a step closer, eyes red, a hot fiery aura igniting his olive skin, fire to Sherra's sickly blue-green aura of ice. "Ahaaaaha! Then carry them out."

Her lip curls. "I shall."

"Then you stand fast? You won't hand him over?"

"No."

"As you wish."

And, staff-less, with his bare hands, with a keening, bloodcurdling cry, Xellos lunges.

He is very fast, a purple streak. So fast that it dazes Val when Sherra jerks out of his way.

The smell of oranges burns Val's nostrils. It mixes with a smoky sweet smell, like too-strong incense, like a lit pipe. It gets stronger and then weaker again as Xellos darts to and fro, calculating a hole, a weak spot, in Sherra's defenses.

Sherra trips on Val's tail, dangling at her feet. The child howls in pain as she stumbles, and curses.

Xellos pounces.

There is a ripping sound as Xellos's fangs take out the whole right shoulderpad of Sherra's armor, as well as a chunk of skin. Someone inhales sharply.

Xellos laughs louder, perversely excited. He spits out Sherra's shoulderpad and a mouthful of her black blood, at her feet. "That's you in five minutes!" he sings, wiping his mouth. "How droll! I think I shall take you a piece at a time! And I haven't even cast a spell yet!"

"Sadist." Sherra's voice is now distantly sardonic. She draws her sword and hurls it at Xellos's head.

It is his turn to feint. He whirls in a circle and ducks. The sword, a lesser demon, lodges into the stone wall, pinning his cloak. Xellos fiercely shrugs out of it.

He screams again, and in that noise there is the occasional deranged giggling. Sherra peals out an appreciative return screech, colder, higher, as she dodges him a second time.

Stainless steel and brass pots and pans clang to the counter, off the open ice box, to the floor. Xellos leaps onto the cutting board on the counter, knocking potent-smelling onions and lemons off on to the floor, flinging strainers and utensils out of his way. Tomato juice spills and stains the white towels, and Val's stomach lurches. He wishes he could smell his father's citrus scent over the mixed kitchen contents and the metallic odor of Sherra's bloody shoulder.

Sherra takes a butcher's knife and flings it at Xellos. It sinks in his chest and he laughs scornfully, dislodging it without a scratch. His false skin pops back into place with a warbling sound. "Try again!"

The female demon focuses, shrugging off his taunting smile. It is then that magic enters the battle, as Sherra flings a spell in the form of an ear-popping, arctic shockwave.

Val squeals and covers his ears, hair roiling wildly at the mercy of the wind.

Xellos cackles, teleporting out of range. His palms cup near each other, as if he is stroking an invisible sphere. A white hot light with a red aura heats up in that space—a new spell. "Again!" And he hurls a sea of twisting red-black cones at her.

They begin to dance around each other, each anticipating the exquisite, poetic attack-moves of the other by milliseconds, each in perfect step with the other. Red and black colored spells that lack incantations careen off the walls, missing their targets each time.

It's like a deadly waltz.

Xellos works Sherra back into a corner opposite the ice box, taking her apart as promised, piece by piece, until there is a bit of her bleeding black from all four limbs. Still she holds on to Val. Despite having the upper hand by sheer, innate power, Xellos is panting with the labor of taking out so formidable and skilled a foe as a fellow mazoku general.

Xellos crouches forward for the final of many devastating blows.

The beauty of his features, beneath those glossy pageboy bangs, is lost to the most savagely contorted snarl of glee that can be imagined in Val's darkest of nightmares.

Vicious wrinkles hide his nose, cheeks, forehead, and most of his eyes. Those eyes are two vivid red slits and his remaining face is almost nothing but distended white fangs. His panting grows, almost as if he is erotically charged by his unabashed hatred for his current enemy, as if he is feasting gluttonously on his own negative energies.

A monster.

Suddenly, Sherra holds up her free hand, and goes down on one knee in surrender.

Sherra is a prudent demon.

"You may be shocked to realize I have no intentions of harming your hatchling, as…invigorating as this has been."

Xellos freezes. Slowly, he straightens. His features reappear, smooth as marble. His fangs disappear. His eyes return to amethyst, distinguishing again between whites, irises, and cat pupils. "What?"

"There has been sufficient evidence for what I was sent to ascertain, I think. We've been at this for half an hour, after all, and my schedule is rather full." The female mazoku actually manages to glance at a silver pocketwatch hanging from her belt, under her swishing blue braid. She stands stiffly, still holding Val under one arm, and kicks some onion peels out of her way.

Val looks hastily between the demons. His heart deafens him. "Xel…?" he pleads.

"…Sherra, why ARE you here?" The testiness of Xellos's voice is, remarkably, almost imperceptible. His fingers flex at his sides in little involuntary spasms, the only thing betraying his rage.

He glances at Val, a trace of anxiety surfacing on his features, as if it has suddenly occurred to him that the child will be frightened of him after seeing his savage breed of rescue efforts.

On the contrary, Val struggles insistently, trying to reach for him.

The blue-haired mazoku laughs—a cold, quiet, breathy sound, an arctic breeze in pine trees. "Beastmaster Zelas was tired of having a mopey lovesick general," she nods at Xellos, "so she cajoled Lord Dynast into lending me out to her to do some jobs you've been neglecting."

"Bullshit." Xellos's anxiety vanishes, and his smile is tight. "My performance is impeccable. Always. No matter what."

There is somehow no emotion on Sherra's face, even when she is smug, aside that strange intensity of her eyes. "Alright, I concede that. Truthfully, word travels fast among demons—after all, gossip _is_ a sin—and Lord Dynast sent me to test you."

Now it is Xellos's turn to laugh—that giggle, high, cold, and scornful. His staff materializes in his right hand, the red orb glowing, and he begins to twirl it menacingly, warming up for the killing strike that had been delayed moments ago. "What is it with people 'testing' me these days? The dragon elders testing my fitness as a father, Lord Beastmaster testing my loyalty, now what? What is left to test?"

"Your l-o-v-e." Sherra's fangs reappear as she spells out the loathed word. They are fangs like Xellos's, only thinner and smaller, and less lupine. More like the fangs of an ermine.

Xellos cocks his head. "I should think that fairly well established by now. Haven't I become the black sheep of Lord Shabranigdo's 'grandchildren'?"

"Which brings me to the more significant connection being made with this test of your you-know-what towards this child." Sherra nods at Val still stiffly dangling under her arm. Val whimpers and reaches for Xellos again.

Xellos instinctively lunges to reach the child. Sherra begins to mirror every menacingly graceful gesture that Xellos makes with his staff, the dance again initiated.

Xellos recoils, the bridge of his nose wrinkling. He is clearly unused to an almost equal opponent. He is even more unused to not getting his way. "Val, it will be alright," he growls.

"Not necessarily." Sherra reads his thoughts. She speaks in a colorless monotone. "My fellow military leader, coercion and sweet-talking won't always save you, or the person you…care for. You now have an Achille's Heel. That is why it would have been better never to fall in…affection…with Filia Ul Copt and her son."

"I'm really not in the mood for small talk." The feral rumble has not left Xellos's otherwise velvet voice. "What were you saying, about this connection between Lord Shabranigdo and my _love_?"

He forces the forbidden word through his lips, and the toll on his astral body is immediate. It manifests in his illusive physical shell: in the graying of his skin, in a cold sweat, in the way he abruptly staggers down on one knee and gulps for air. A vein pronounces against his forehead, through his bangs.

But it's done the trick—Sherra is so stunned that she drops Val.

The child falls with an "oomph!" to the floor, eyes dazed.

"VALTEIRA, COME HERE." Xellos roars this, lashing to his feet and opening his arms to the boy.

Val recovers quickly. He vaults into his father's grasp and clings with all four limbs to his torso. And for the first time since their argument, Val is sobbing, producing a great wet blob on Xellos's shirt.

Sherra's face becomes very pale and very constricted. She cocks back her head regally, like an ice sculpture of a noblewoman, sheathing her sword. "Clever," she hisses.

"I try." Xellos follows her eyes to Val curled around his waist. He wraps his cloak around the child's clinging, shivering form. "You don't have permission to look at him."

Sherra scoffs. "You don't have permission to bestow or withdraw permission."

"You only think that because you can't begin to comprehend a parent's powers. Now, Sherra, to the point, and this time I _mean_ it."

"The wild claim has cropped up that you have spoken to the Lord of Nightmares herself, during your bargaining for Lord Darkstar's—ah, that is, Gourry Gabriev's—now-destroyed sword. I see the pendant around your neck furthers this claim." Sherra nods coolly at the gold adornment swinging on Xellos's neck, the pendant embossed with the sun, the letter L, and the long hair. "That is her mark, is it not? The mark of L-Sama?"

"Yes." He smiles a bit too patiently. "Keep going. You're getting there."

"It is a mark for the Source of All. But it is also a mark for something you are now enabled to experience, since the Lord of Nightmares shared a certain revelation with you."

"Correct."

"A revelation that the universe is not meant to be returned to chaos, by mazoku or anyone else, because if it had been, the Lord of All would have done so herself."

"Excellent."

"Therefore there is no reason why mazoku should be forbidden to feel certain emotions that directly conflict with a desire to destroy all life."

"Yes. Eureka. Bingo, and precisely."

"And the fact that you fought with me—someone who could, with effort, actually kill you…"

Xellos arrogantly rolls his eyes. "Sure. Heh."

Her face becomes sour. "…Your hubris is crippling..."

"I know." Now he mock-pouts at her. "But it's just so damned justified."

Sherra sighs and continues. "...At any rate, the fact that you would fight a _formidable adversary_, rather than take your usual self-preserving path of least resistance, is the closest I can come to obtaining empirical evidence of your capacity to possess l-o-v-e."

"Which also starts with L, as you astutely observed." Xellos winks at Sherra, tapping the gold pendant with the L embossed in the center.

"L-Sama's gift to you."

"No, not exactly. I would have already felt it for Filia and Valteira had I never learned the great secret: that Lord Shabranigdo's objective for his children is a mistaken one. I am simply a freak of nature. However, having known all along that Lord Shabranigdo WAS mistaken, I have never felt the compunction or the disloyalty that unwitting others of our race THINK I should feel. And so I have doggedly pursued my two dragons, knowing I am in no way betraying my maker."

"But Xellos." And Sherra is smug again. "Wouldn't you have divided your loyalties anyway, if Lord Beastmaster had not believed you, if she had wished to further punish you for devoting yourself to the she-dragon?"

Xellos stares at his colleague for an eternity. His lip curls up on one edge like the rosy tendril of a sinuous flower petal. He presses a finger to that lip. "Can you keep a secret?"

"That's your forte. But I can indeed."

"Alright. Then yes."

Sherra's smile is no longer amicable. "Well, I'll keep that secret. But that doesn't mean I won't act on it."

Xellos's muscles tense, fiber by fiber. He reaches into his robe, and begins to pry Val loose, sliding the child around to his back. He buys time talking. "Does this mean you will tell Lord Dynast your slant of my claim?"

"Oh, I'll tell him you're sincere, fear not. Say it again, Xellos. Say THAT word."

For a fleeting instant, Xellos's ego has the better of him. "Love," he slurs, sloppily, like there's something too hot burning his tongue. Again he leans forward, again he is weakened. Behind him, Val pushes to keep him from falling backward.

Xellos recovers enough to straighten—and to realize his mistake. "Ah. Shit. Heh."

Sherra nods. "Mm. Lord Dynast told me to eradicate you if it turned out you were a traitor. And based on your little 'secret,' you are. You just use L-Sama's revelation as a convenient tool. I'd rather not have you for an adversary the rest of my immortal lifetime."

Xellos emits a silent laugh, head slowly lulling back. "Ahhhh, but to rid yourself of my animosity, you need not necessarily pacify me. You could just kill me, now that you've tricked me into weakening myself twice."

"Precisely." Sherra's emerald ice eyes have a hungry sheen. "I could just kill you. After all, the Beastmaster is the only one of Lord Shabranigdo's children who really believes your egomaniacal story."

"Right _now_, that is," Xellos retorts, but the carnivorous growl has already returned to his voice, and his fangs, like Sherra's again gleam. He strains to summon what energy he still has. "Why gamble? Why commit suicide by killing me? Why commit suicide, heh, by even TRYING to kill me? I, who have the power of TWO of you, Sherra?"

Val now clings to Xellos from behind, lodged to his back, safer than he was when lodged to his chest. Xellos reaches back and sharply pokes him, gesturing towards the open kitchen door, towards escape.

The child shakes his head and holds fast, at first. Xellos pokes him again, and, with a soft whimper, he begins to climb down to his father's legs to the cold stone ground.

"I have some tricks up my sleeve. I have something you don't, Xellos."

"Entertain my curiosity, Sherra. What advantage does Dynast Grausherra's general have over _me_?"

"I have the freedom to be _selfish_." And Sherra draws another, unfamiliar weapon from her belt. She dives for the fleeing Val.

Val screams.

"NO...!" Xellos is too fast for Sherra, and she is counting on his precarious speed.

She is counting on him to leap in front of Val, and she is counting on him to run right into the burst of magic—not black magic, but WHITE magic—that erupts from the end of a small dagger in her concealed right hand.

It works.

Xellos lets out an aborted shriek, a howl of agony with which he rarely honors a foe.

He crumples face forward onto the dragon temple floor.

"Not my son, bitch," he spews around a trickle of viscous black goo oozing from his mouth.

He convulses once or twice, struggling to rise, smiling repulsively, the black all over his lips. His eyes carry all the loathing in the universe.

Sherra snorts, standing over him. "Well, that _does _prove it," she murmurs, scratching her chin.

"P-proves what, my dear Sherra?"

"Well. Riksfalto, Deep Sea Dolphin's general, believes your claims even less than I do. She loaned me this white magic vessel, with a charm that blocks harm to demons wielding it, in order to try and finish you off. Dolphin's priest, Huraker, won the dagger at a card game in the same town you helped Luna Inverse relieve after a massacre. "

"Spectacular," Xellos spits.

Sherra gives a sarcastic curtsy. "We covered our tracks because some of the Beastmaster's wolves were there that night, too, and hungry. Otherwise you might have suspected foul play from your colleagues for months."

"P-pity I miscalculated," Xellos stammers. "Inverse suggested that massacre was Riksfalto's work…But...agh…that is what happens when you care for someone more than yourself…I don't expect you to understand, Sherra. It is a c-curious feeling, newborn even to me…"

"Good. Because I _don't_ understand." Sherra dislodges her sword from the wall. "Prepare to die, Xellos Metallium. Nothing personal."

Val was running from the room for help, but when he hears this he turns, and freezes. He is suddenly transfixed with the weirdly distant observation that mom's blood was red all over her, and dad's blood, mazoku blood, is black all over him. And that, either way, it is blood.

And Val can't move.

But then the bogey ladey arrives.

Lina Inverse enters the room with a roared Elmekia Lance. It strikes Sherra Grausherra in the chest and forces her backward with an angry snarl. Her sword clatters to the ground.

"ONE OF THESE DAYS, I'M GONNA END YOU!" the redheaded sorceress roars, emerging from a somersault to land in front of Xellos and Val. "MILGASIA! CAST A CHAOTIC DISINTEGRATE, NOW!"

As Lina's loyal company of Luna, Amelia, Gourry, Zelgadiss, Naga, and Sylphiel coil around the demon and his hatchling, each firing up some manner of astral spell, Milgasia looms in, white robes billowing, arms gesticulating. He chants in a strange, gutteral language of holy words.

"CHAOTIC DISINTEGRATE!" he bellows, propelling the spell, a white and sparkling fire of holy magic, devastating to a dark astral body, directly at Sherra's head.

Sherra hisses, her ermine fangs bared and her eyes suddenly crimson, teleporting just out of range of the spell. "I know when I'm not welcome," she coldly quips. "Very well, I suppose I'll suffer your existence, Xellos, since it seems you've made friends. Lina Inverse, I will remember your threat."

"Glad to hear it," Lina growls, with an angry smile. "I'll be counting down the days till I see you again, ya frigid bitch."

"Get lost!" Gourry barks, simultaneous with Amelia's screech of, "_Leave in the name of justice!"_

"Go screw an icicle," Zelgadiss rumbles, his sword still pulsating red with an Astral Vine. Naga laughs her strange, birdlike giggle.

Luna, the other big sister present, licks her sword tip tauntingly at Sherra and, under her lavender bangs, tartly wiggles her eyebrows. "I'll be Ceiphied, you be Shabranigdo, Grausherra, and we'll see if I can split your soul into seven pieces, eh? Gimme your best shot, I dare you."

Lina's smile remains. "That sounds fun, big sis. I wanna watch. Because I have Sherra's word that she won't forget my threat."

Sherra returns Lina's acid expression. She backs to the doorway, against which leans Filia, bandaged and frail, transfixed with fury.

Suddenly, the dragoness lifts her fists and beats on Sherra's cold hard armor. "I-I-I'll th-threaten y-you MYSELF!" she forces from her damaged throat. Somehow, in this instant, Filia is truly terrifying. "G-gettaway f-from MY MONSTER! AND GET AWAY FROM MY SON!"

Sherra, irritated, raises her arms to block the dragoness. With a sharp fizzle, she finally disappears.

Filia blinks.

A moment of silence.

Then everyone, except Val and Filia, erupts in laughter.

Filia crouches at Xellos's side. Her lip trembles.

"Filly…honey, you almost got butchered a few months ago, don't make a habit of getting demons pissed at you," Xellos croaks very softly. "Fisticuffs isn't generally a good way to exterminate a monster…"

"S-SHUT UP, I LOVE YOU," Filia bawls, struggling to turn him over and hug him—getting black goo from his side all over her white robes.

Val shrinks away to a corner the minute she succeeds.

Lina is standing nearest the child. "You okay?" she whispers.

Val shakes his head, expression stony.

At least she's not the bogey lady anymore.

"Why don't you go hug your dad?"

"Coz every time I'm with him he gets hurt," the child mumbles. "And I said I hated him. And that was real bad of me."

"Really bad," Xellos, who has remarkable hearing, corrects Val's grammar softly to himself, across the room. His eyes, amethyst and clear and bottomless, rove, searching for the boy, growing frustrated.

Filia bends over Xellos, brushing his cheek with her soft honeysuckle-scented hair. Her face rests beside his, her body reposes against his on the cold hard floor. Her hands wonderingly trace the perfect contours of his face, as if it is the first time she has ever seen her lover.

If possible there is more adoration, now, in her cornflower eyes, than before—the adoration and gratitude of a mother who has truly recognized how much someone has done for her child. Her fingers stop at his lips and trace them tenderly, brushing away the black blood.

She stares at it on her fingers almost as if she had never realized Xellos could himself be destructible, or vulnerable.

Xellos moans softly, mouth both sore and wanting at once, and shivers. He sighs, craning his neck up to touch Filia again until she obliges, placing her finger back on his mouth. Then he smiles, lips wrapping moistly around that finger, suckling it once. "Is he alright?" he asks, at the end of this quiet gesture of intimacy.

Filia smooths her monster's violet hair off his forehead and kisses it. Then she nods. "Y…yes. You…r-rest or I'll ki-kill you myself."

Xellos smiles again, and there are dimples on that face which seems so impossibly innocent and angelic, at times, on a demon.

And then he closes his eyes.

"He misses ya," Lina persists, in the corner, to Val. She bends over. "And Xellos doesn't miss anyone. So that's sayin' something."

Val doesn't move.

By now Xellos has slipped into unconsciousness. Milgasia gently pushes Filia aside and lifts the mazoku who killed a third of his own race a millennium ago into his arms.

Things change.

Milgasia carries Xellos down the hallway, the company trailing behind, Filia seizing Val's hand tightly until they arrive in her room.

"He will be alright," Milgasia mutters. "The wound is not as bad as it looks. Just some rest. Only black magic can properly heal a monster, so he will just have to leech off of some of our negative spiritual energies for the next several days."

Filia nods, wiping her eyes, and opens her arms to Val, imploring his presence.

Val runs into his mother's arms and doesn't let go for a long time.

When that moment passes, he timidly kneels next to Xellos, who reposes on a bed of down feathers next to Filia's hanging hammock. He realizes how strangely beautiful and frightening and wonderful his adoptive father is. He realizes how much he has always had, without realizing it, how devoted Xel really is. He feels like there is a bubble lifting in his chest where there was once lead and nausea. Light and warm, very much like when Xel eats his bad feelings. He feels guilt from a past life that was not his lifting away permanently.

He realizes that he really does matter that much, to both his mom and his dad—so much that both would bleed and bleed for him, and bleed and bleed some more. They really do love him. Maybe that means he is a good boy, after all.

Val curls up on Xel's chest. He feels his mom's gentle hands caressing his hair, and his eyes slowly slide closed. Real safety surrounds him again. He doesn't even waken when two of Milgasia's priests come to remove Xel's black-stained shirt and replace it with a clean white tunic of their own.

The tunic is unbuttoned down to the navel. Val stirs, an hour or so later, still surrounded by mom and her friends, and looks directly at the place where Xel's tattoo of Zelas Metallium has always been branded in black over his heart.

There is something else there now. Superimposed over it, a tattoo of two encoiled dragons, one gold and one black.

Val does not know why, but his eyes are wet and stinging, and his own chest hurts very badly.

He looks up at his mother's face, and Filia is crying, too. She smiles gently at her son and nods. She puts her hand first on her own chest, and then his, and then over Xel's tattoo. Xel stirs restlessly, but remains asleep.

Milgasia is there now, sitting with his legs crossed, next to mom. He is squinting very hard at Xellos's face. His gold-and-flax eyes grow vague.

"You really can read minds?" Zelgadiss murmurs, hand cupping his chin.

"He can," Lina affirms.

"Yes…Ten generations of my family…" Milgasia nods absently, then turns to Val, eyes refocusing. "The new marking has been there over his heart since he chose not to harm you, Val, when the Beastmaster tempted him to do so. It brands your…father…in equal allegiance with you and your mother as he is with Zelas and the Monster Race."

"H-how?" Filia musters.

"By speaking to the Lord of Nightmares herself, and learning of the inherent flaw in the way Shabranigdo interpreted her plans for the universe." Milgasia smiles wryly at Filia's horrified expression. "I am sure he will explain himself, when he wakes up. Your Xellos loves to…gloat. You should hear the thoughts in his head. He's very unguarded when he sleeps. Pity he almost never needs to. I would repeat more for you, Filia, but I believe you might be a bit…embarrassed…if this crowded room hears of his more colorful fantasies about the two of you." He smiles wanly.

Filia flushes a predictable scarlet, coughs, and fans her face.

Lina and Naga cackle, Zelgadiss makes a disgusted noise, and Amelia looks stricken. Gourry blinks.  
"Will he _leave_ me?" Val whispers suddenly, through his teeth. "Now that mommy's awake, and now that I've told him I hate him? Coz look—he loves me, and I said I hated him. That was so bad."

Filia jolts. She shakes her head sharply, taking his face in her hands, kissing it over and over.

"I think it's _highly_ unlikely, Valteira," Milgasia adds, voicing Filia's thoughts, and squinting again at the slumbering Lesser Beast.

But Val is still afraid. He crawls off of Xel's chest and trudges to his room, where he falls asleep under mom and Xel's ever-thriving orange tree.

Filia pokes the writing tablet fiercely.

She has exerted her injured throat talking too much the past week. Milgasia and her mother have forced her to write messages as opposed to further straining her larynx.

Xellos, his head in her lap, smiles in a way that shows both his dimples. As it does only with Filia and Val, that smile reaches his eyes. He looks like he is trying not to burst out giggling at his lover's frustrated, flushed face. It only comes off looking like he has a case of indigestion.

Filia smacks the tablet with her palm, and some of the chalk message gets erased. Tears of frustration spring to her eyes.

"Ahaha, Filly, honey, I'll just read your palm, then…ahahaha get it? Now I just need a crystal ball and some Tarot cards…" He takes her hand and turns it over, lips moving silently with the words. "…No. I don't think so."

She strikes him on the arm.

He wails in mock pain. "Cruelty! VIOLENCE! My woman is beating me!"

She starts crying.

"Filia, sweetheart, come onnnnn." He sits up gingerly, and kisses her. "Look. What you said here." He points to the tablet. "I have to disagree. I am on the mend now, and, more importantly, so are you. I think it would be best if I went away for a couple of weeks, so he can…just…you know, cool down. I'm sure there's a lot of work I have to catch up on anyway. It's good to keep the Beastmaster's good graces these days."

Filia shakes her head and punches Xellos in the chest.

"Ow." Now he really does wince. "Easy on the left hook."

"You probably deserved it." Filia's mother glides into the room with a tea tray. Aside berating his preference of Darjeeling tea over Chai, the aging dragoness, who is aware of his identity, species, and status, seems to have nevertheless taken an alarming liking to Filia's "husband."

"Don't gang up on me again," Xellos whines.

But Filia is already furiously scrawling a new message.

Xellos reads it. "…Yes. That is what saying 'oranges' means between us. He made it up. But this is for the best, Filly. I am never gone forever—I'm not his biological father, and I'm not, in the name of seven hells, Gaav. I will do better by the boy than both of them. YOU can tell him that."

"You're leaving? How monsterish of you," Filia's mother snips, primly stirring too much sugar into their tea.

"Not forever, Madam Ul Copt." At times, Xellos's patience exceeds mortal capacities. "Just a week or two."

Filia sighs sharply, cheeks poofing out. More writing.

More reading. Xellos grins fangily at the mother, covering his mouth to stifle a guffaw. "She told me to ignore you."

Out the mother stalks, leaving her tea behind her. Her tail swishes, popping into view.

"It's hereditary," Xellos snickers.

Filia waits until her meddling matriarch is gone to attack the tablet again.

Xellos reads. "No, actually. I _don't_ think it would be best if I said goodbye first. I don't want to force him to talk to me when he still doesn't seem to want to."

Still more writing. This time Xellos pauses before he looks at Filia, but when he does, his face is strangely fierce.

"Of COURSE I do," he breathes. "Both of you. More than my own life. Never ask me that again, as if you don't already know it."

Filia writes two words now, in all capitals: "THEN STAY."

Xellos sets his jaw. "No." He struggles to his feet. "You know how I hate ultimatums. I had better leave before he wakes up, on that note."

"It will hurt him," Filia manages to rasp out loud. Her cornflower eyes are desperate.

Xellos pauses. He looks over his shoulder. Something in his return gaze inspires great pity in his lover. He smiles that congenial smile—and there is no happiness in it. "It will hurt me more," he says, lifting an eyebrow.

_But this is what he needs._ The unspoken words of a real father hang in the air between them. Filia does not agree, but now she understands, feeling those words, and their selfless intentions. She nods, and lets him go.

The air shimmers and fizzles with teleporting magic. And Xellos leaves.

Not five minutes pass before Val, wild-eyed, stumbles into the room. "HE LEFT!" the child screams. "HE LEFT, I know he left! The orange tree is all brown and dead!"

Filia reaches for her son, eyes pained. Her other hand scrambles for her writing tablet.

"No, mom!" Val tears away. "No, I gotta catch him! Where'd he go?!"

Filia scrawls frantically, holding up a finger. "W-wait, honey…" she rasps. "…Can…explain…"

"I CAN'T wait!" the child screams. "I can't let him LEAVE! He thinks I hate him! He'll never come back!" He whirls on his heel, and careens out of the room.

Filia puts down her tablet and struggles to stand. She stumbles after her son, leaving behind the beginning of a long explanation halfway written. But the words that are already there are sufficient, if difficult to believe: "Because he loves you…"

Tears douse Val's cheeks, cascading, flooding his skin, fill his mouth with salt, as he runs. He runs faster, faster, harder, to leave Valgaav behind, to be Valteira, to be the person who deserves Xellos Metallium as his dad. He sheds Valgaav and anger and self-hatred like snakeskin…

… "_Never doubt yourself, Val_…"

He wipes his nose—snot and tears run miserably. He keeps running, running. All around him stalactites and outcropping become the splattered and blurry brown-black haze of spilled paint….

… "_Oranges, you weird and precious child of mine…"_

He must catch Xel…

… "_Alright, my little task-master…"_

He will….

… "_I will respect your judgment of me. You made it with much forethought_…"

"_I hate you_" : the biggest lie Val's ever told. Words he has to take back. Words that make his young heart ache with a pain that should be too keen for his years.

… "_To 'pants' or not to 'pants,'_…" _Laughter. That weird giggly cackle of dad that tickles Val's stomach, and makes him laugh too. _

Val hasn't heard it in weeks…

…"_I love you, dad…" _Maybe there's hope. Maybe Xel remembers Val saying that…

Somehow his wings open…

…"_Flap your wings vigorously. That means really hard. Now step off the tree branch…"_

He runs faster still, scowls, leaps up into the air, in a gracious arc. The impact of his feet with the earth too is delayed for just jumping. The pause between impacts grows each time he leaps upward, still flapping.

Val looks up and sees sunlight: He is approaching the tall, narrow open doors of the subterranean temple. He is seeing light for the first time in months. Fresh air beats against his face as he runs. He runs through the cathedral of the dragon race, paying no heed to its marbled floors and pillars, ignoring the roiling red statue of Ceiphied. None of this matters to a little boy with something to prove to his father.

And then he sees the back of a purple head…as one of the two most important people in his life rises into the air and begins to glide away, not seeing him, not hearing him...a little too far away…

… "_It's okay, Val. I'll catch you_…"

Val isn't sure when he started shouting, but he knows his voice is already hoarse when he realizes he is screaming _"XEL! XEL! WAIT!"_ over and over.

Val's heart drops into his feet and rises like heat into the sky all at once. His chest becomes strangely light and his feathered ebony wings flex out their full span. He thrusts them up and down, twice, harder than he ever has:

FLY. COME ON. FLY!

And then Val is soaring.

He hardly stops to think on this triumph: He is still trying to catch dad. Xel is always at least fifteen feet ahead, not hearing, not seeing, and any second, Val knows, he will teleport, and there will be no way to catch him…

… "_When we get you to fully transform, you'll be able to REALLY zoom…"_

Fine, then. Val knows what he has to do.

The last ancient dragon will claim his birthright, and change into his true form.

There will be a pure ancient dragon on earth again, for the first time in over a millennium.

Val closes his eyes and concentrates.

He still sees Xel flying ahead, in that wobbly, cold, neon-and-black void that attacks your retinas behind your eyelids.

He draws a deep breath and flexes his muscles, his bone, his cartilage, all of it in one willful burst of energy.

That is all. Something inside Valteira Ul Copt bursts.

He enters a cloud behind the ever-ascending Xel, and his skin is assaulted with a tangy flavor, with the cold piercing impact of the cloud's ice crystals.

Then something encoils Val's skin and embraces the warmth left under his pores, buffers the touch of the ice.

For a moment Val thinks Xel has come back and is holding him.

He feels sleepy. But he doesn't feel like he's plummeting. No. He's still rising…and the freedom is incredible…euphoric…perfect….

A pause.

Silence, stillness. Deceptive peace.

Xellos stops twenty feet over a particularly fat cumulus cloud, utterly alone to his own knowledge, to adjust his knapsack and gaze at the red orb on the tip of his staff. "Guess I should call in to work," he mutters humorlessly. His chest is so heavy somehow. How weird, this feeling of being…connected. Invested. Deeply.

It was a bit easier before he had a secretly sentimental side.

A lot easier before he had any modicum of a conscience.

Oh well. Life.

Maybe blowing up some innocent bystanders might take off this glum edge.

Or causing a small civil war. No, too high-maintenance…

Pillaging a temple…nah.

Probably just slitting a stray bandit's throat will do the trick. If Lina Inverse has left any for him to kill.

Whatever.

A distant rumbling, shifting, flapping explosion: thunder?

"…Eh?" Xellos peers more keenly through the orb at a swiftly approaching black figure.

A feathered black figure.

Small but graceful, slender but still tender with babyfat, dark as midnight, scaled and feathered—an ancient dragon hatchling fully transformed. It lets out a shrill, sweet little roar, puffing out ringlets of smoke indignantly at Xellos's head.

Xellos drops his staff. For some reason he can't see. He can't see at all, and his eyes are burning in an alien way. But it's not an entirely unpleasant sensation.

He simply sinks, like a bullet, back to the ground. His jaw has not lifted from its slack position since he spotted his child's approach.

Yes. _His _child. _His_ child, flying. Transformed. _His _incredible child.

Well. Marvels never cease for the wandering and impish soul.

And oh my. Xellos's smile is making his face hurt.

Val extends all four talon-feet at Xellos as he plummets after him.

He tackles Xellos with such force that there is a handsome male mazoku-shaped crater in the grassy knoll under their two bodies.

"…Okay, OW…rewind, please…" Xellos grumbles, voice muffled.

"DON'T LEAVE!"

The words flow from a streamlined ebony head with a feathery crest, mingling the features of a deer, a falcon, and a gecko lizard—all attached to a long, swanlike, scaly neck. The sight of a large black lizard talking in such an animated fashion is almost amusing.

The voice belongs to Val.

"Don't leave, Xel! I'll stop being a jerk, I swear! Or..or.. MOM hates it when you leave! D—don't leave for HER! PLEASE, Xel! I'll do anything!"

Giant gold eyes, red-rimmed and moist, implore the monster's mercy, as Val the ancient dragon shifts weight and scurries off of his father.

The mazoku eases gingerly out of the hole that his body made upon being crushed under the horse-sized dragon hatchling. His awe and, strangely, his reverence, for Val have not yet dissolved.

"Look at you," he breathes, still grinning, still gawking elatedly. And then, louder, "_Look at you_!" as he charges the boy, dusty and covered in grass, and embraces Val around the scaly black neck, dropping his staff. "AHAHA! VAL! You _transformed_!"

Val wriggles out of Xellos's grasp. The impatience on his reptilian face would indeed be comical in another situation. "WHO CARES? Are you LISTENING?"

"Of course! Of COURSE I am, but _Val_, for a dragon, this is a _big deal_!"

There is a green flash of light and Val is in human form again, except for his right arm, which remains a scaly black talon. He scowls at it, redfaced.

"I don't care."

"VAL! Of COURSE you care! Seven hells, did you show your _mother_ yet?"

"Nooo. LISTEN. It just NOW happened. When I was tryinna catch up with YOU."

Xellos is speechless. A myriad range of emotions flicker and quickly vanish across his face before he settles for something that mingles attentive and gently amused. He clears his throat. "Ah, um…Val, I'm listening."

"…I was telling you not to leave me."

Xellos guffaws. It's a strange shaky laugh, the same kind of laugh he made when Filia first awoke from her coma. "Val!" he scoffs, his sunny face fighting a grimace of realization and pain. "Val, you CAN'T have thought I was leaving for GOOD…"

"I thought you were mad at me." Val glares harder at his hybrid leg, flexing his fingers. It won't change over.

"Oh, damn and blast. Filia was right again." Xellos snorts. "I'm not mad at you at all. The opposite, really. I thought YOU were mad at ME. I was just going away to give you space."

"I dun want space. Space sucks. I hate space." Val's lip trembles.

"We're just a couple of freaks then, aren't we?" Xellos pads over to the hatchling and removes his gloves. He puts a hand on each side of Val's talon-arm. "Come on, goofball. You always had trouble with this one. Even before you were reborn." His eyes are very soft. "All you have to do is breathe in and out a couple times and calm down. Then you can …sort of pull back…the way you pushed out to change into a dragon."

"Don't call me a goofball. And I'm not doin' anything until you say if you're leaving or not."

"I…" Xellos whets his lips. "I WAS going to go tie up some loose ends at work."

"You're leaving."

"…Nope."

Val looks up, quietly gasping, suddenly hopeful.

A warm, citrus-smelling hand presses lightly and tenderly against Val's cheek. "I," Xellos pledges in a calm and matter-of-fact voice, "will never leave you forever. Never. Never. Ever. Clear? I already told you that. And work can wait a few more days, as things now stand." He cocks an eyebrow and smiles that dimples-smile, with the warmth reaching his amethyst eyes.

"Kay. Then…fix it." Val closes his eyes, leans into dad, and inhales oranges. Trusting implicitly.

Xellos chuckles, and it's a smoky, wry sound. "Yes, yes, child of mine. Inhale, exhale…picture your arm shrinking…there you go…very good! Fixed! You have impressed and moved me more than you know. And I have seen a lot of things, so it takes more than a trifle to impress ME."

"Xel…what made you um…love me?" An embarrassed question, quietly mumbled. Val's ears droop.

The mazoku only misses a beat or two before replying, "A lot of things. But chief among them?" His eyes meander and his mental gears rapidly work. An opportunity of the benevolent sort occurs to him. To his own astonishment, he takes it. "You are the reason why I met your mother."

Just then, Filia appears behind a rock outcropping, watching and listening. She smiles in relief, panting for breath, and presses a finger to her lips when Xellos gazes over and realizes her presence. Her eyes are moist and it is clear she has witnessed her son's great rite of passage in his full physical transformation, as well.

Xellos and Val are standing where the newborn Xellos and the teenaged Milgasia stood over a thousand years ago—right after Xellos destroyed hundreds of golden dragons with one flick of his wrist.

But this is a very different sort of conversation.

"…huh?" Val wrinkles his nose.

"Yeah. Think about it."  
"I'm TRYIN'!" Val snaps, scowling so hard that his face turns magenta.

"Don't have a stroke, little Buddha," Xellos chortles, ruffling the aqua hair of the child attached to his leg. "See, the simple way of explaining it is, when you were Valgaav, your mother and I were both drawn to you in order to champion our side of the war between the gods and monsters. A never ending and painful war for all factions, with no known cause, simply orders and directives to carry out by 'nature.'"

"…Yeah?"

"Well. I just found out how wrong that assumption is. The guy I work for—the guy MY boss and mother works for—was wrong. So was the guy your mom used to work for. And when you were Valgaav, you actually helped your mom and I realize this. You brought us together, made us work together to keep the world going. We would have never met had it not been for you, Val."

"…Really?"

"Yes. You're the mediator. You're what's between dark," Xellos points to his chest, "and light," and Xellos points to Filia.

"Oh." Val glances back at his mom, waves, absent with thought, his frown decreasing.

"You're not gray, though. You're COLORS. You're the way things SHOULD be, Val. You're the mix. You're the reason. The reason for everything. Or at least you're the first person who understood it. And I'm confident it will come back to you, that reason, in this life. Your mom and I will help you understand. Neither of us is going anywhere. I promise."

"Xel," Val whispers shakily, "I only get parts of what you're s-sayin', but I just wanted t-to say I don't hate you…"

"Oh, Val." Xellos chuckles again. "Buddy, I know that. I know. Believe me, I know the taste of REAL hate. You don't even know what that is yet. I shall try and make sure you never do. I may not succeed, but it is still every parent's…wish."

"Coz you're my night light. Mister Gourry said so."

Filia approaches, kneels between her boys, and wraps her arms around both their waists. She looks smug somehow. Knowing. Wiser than she was before Val hatched from his egg.

Xellos gnaws his lip with a brief wave of frustration. "I….Hrm…"

"I know, Xel. Oranges." Val buries his face in the monster's shirt.

"…Oranges." Xellos grins. "An orchard of them. All yours, kid. Growing all year round. Heh. What a metaphor run wild we have on our hands…"

"Peel 'em for me." Val rubs his face into that safe, familiar smelling shirt like a kitten, grinning and sniffling, and probably getting snot and tears all over Xellos.

Xellos however is quite proud of the tear blob on his chest from the earlier battle. He doesn't mind at all. "Yes, O Lord Valteira," he snickers.

Filia sighs happily and kisses both her lover and her son on the cheek.

"Welcome back, mom," Val whispers.

"No. What? REPEAT that in the VERNACULAR, please," Lina roars. "Brevity is the soul of freakin' wit!"

"What about shoe soles?" Gourry blinks.

Lina approaches a state of apoplexy. She gyrates at the blond swordsman, making wordless, strangled sounds in her throat. Finally, wringing her hands, she gurgles something that sounds vaguely like, "GRAHHH, NO!"

"I don't know what's going on or who these people are," Naga grumbles, gesturing her ever-present beer mug at Xellos, Filia, and Val, "but where's the bloody brewery in this cavern?"

Milgasia chuckles dryly.

"You guys, stop horsing around and listen, this has enormous implications for universal pacifism and JUSTICE!" Amelia chirps this claim at a supersonic pitch, pumping Zelgadiss's arm via their entwined hands.

Zelgadiss grunts and nurses his migraine, rubbing his rocky temples. "His ego," he murmurs, voice a disillusioned moan. "His EGO. How will we LIVE with it? Xellos, a priest of L-SAMA?"

Filia, with Val snoozing in her lap, sighs. She glances towards the seat next to hers, at a closed-eyed Xellos, who has that inhumanly patient smile on his face.

Luna, on Lina's left, turns smirking to the yin-yang couple and their child. "You're just waiting for the peanut gallery to stuff it, aren't you?"

"Yes," Xellos and Filia reply in unison. Then they grin at each other rather wickedly.

"I'M just waiting to DIE," Zelgadiss groans, head between his hands.

"Then I'll grace you with a reasonable facsimile, and become arrogantly long-winded," Xellos purrs.

"How is that NEW?" The chimera snaps back.

Xellos's lip quirks. "Heh. Always happy to ruin your day, Zel. So everyone shut up, if you please." He bats his illegally long, thick black eyelashes at the so-called peanut gallery, who all gawp back.

"Heh. Thanks. Now. How to put this simply…?"

"Start with the Gorun Nova, honey," Filia suggests, her voice still a touch raspy. She resettles herself in the mazoku's arms, a mirror of Val in her own.

Xellos's jaw twitches, but, characteristically, he indulges his lover. "Why thank you, sweetheart. I was at a loss as to where to begin. Let's go back to the Fibrizzo Campaign, about six years ago. Lina and Gourry have no memory of what happened after Lina cast the out-of-control Giga Slave, but I have an inkling."

He smiles kittenishly as the sorceress and swordsman lean in simultaneously, accidentally bump heads, and furiously blush.

"Everyone on the same page?"

"Yes," Lina snaps, rubbing her skull.

"Okay. So I bargained with something of equal worth in return for the retrieval of the Gorun Nova—the sword of light. Namely, I offered the Lord of Nightmares my services. This is when she bestowed upon me her greatest secret: The mazoku view of the L-Sama is inherently incorrect. She doesn't WANT the worlds returned to the Sea of Chaos. They were suddenly just...there. Spawned out of her at random and without her conscious choice. However, if she wanted them back…"

"She could do it herself," Lina breathes, awestruck despite herself. Her garnet eyes are wide.

"Exactly, Lina!" Xellos beams at the human who has always been his prize pupil. "She could do it herself. But she HASN'T. Indeed, Fibrizzo's plan SHOULD have worked if the mazoku view of her was correct. It was why Fibrizzo was so surprised by her actions, when she eliminated him for meddling with her plans and so aptly threatening world destruction. It was why, really, he panicked at the last moment, realizing he wanted to be destroyed no more than any other creature that exists in this world. I can certainly sympathize. After all, I am not only concerned with my own continued existence these days, but also that of a certain pair of dragons of whom I am most fond."

Now it is Filia's turn to beam, fingers entwining with those of her demon lover.

"How long have you known this to be true?" Lina demands—her voice quieter than usual.

"For some time. Ever since you defeated Fibrizzo."

"All through the entire Darkstar Campaign?"

"Yes."

"Is that why you were so insistent upon saving our world? Not just so that your race could destroy it, but because you knew destruction isn't your race's ultimate objective in the first place?

"Yes."

"So you've been shitting us for years, feigning a lust for world destruction. Deliberately thwarting yourself when you got too close. You knew I was coming to stop you that day when you were trying to break the Ancient Dragon temple barrier for the final Darkstar weapon, to take it to Zelas."

"Heh. Yes. Yes, Lina, I knew you were going to come jump on my head. You're not a goddess of subtlety. It DID hurt, though, if that helps you feel better."

Lina shakes her head slowly, grinning, unable to retain her rage at Xellos when her admiration of his cunning so greatly eclipses that rage. "Damn. Ha."

"So what does this implicate for you, Xellos?" Luna croons. Her own maroon eyes are just as intense as those of her younger sibling.

"Well. I am no stranger to mixed loyalties, and the concept of being in on one of the fundamental secrets of the universe that even the mazoku and shinzoku don't know…heh, I admit it tickled my fancy incredibly. L-Sama, heh, wellll…"

"Oh, gods damn it. Here comes the gloating," Zelgadiss mumbles from his arm-cushion.

Xellos grins fangily. "Ahah. Yes well. L-Sama would gain an incredibly capable and subtle agent in this world to prevent her from needing to be disturbed by such things as what happened with Fibrizzo again. Hence this." He dangles his golden necklace, with the L and the sun, and the woman's tendrils of hair, in front of their eyes.

"You mean to tell me, that when word of this secret spreads to Shabranigdo's children, the mazoku lords, the war between the gods and monsters may come to an END?" Luna, for the first time in her life, is breathless.

"One can hope," Xellos replies. He takes a sip of his tea, peeking open one eye. "For many personal reasons," and he smiles a crooked dimpled smile at the sleeping Val, "one can hope."

Filia kisses him. "I've turned him good," she croaks, grinning mischievously and proudly at the rest of the company.

"I am not rising to that bait," Xellos grumbles back at her. "Anyway, you know better."

"One can hope," she quips, turning his own words against him. Her tail wraps around his arm, the tip tickling his nose.

"Jeez. Woman. You're good." He pretends to bite at that tail-tip, and then he cackles. "But no. As a priest of L-Sama, I TRANSCEND such petty discriminations as 'good' and 'evil.' " The glimmer in his eye suggests he is still joking as well. "What am I really? Sore wa himitsu desu. Heh."

"Sore wa my ass," Zelgadiss grunts.

"What will Zelas do?" Amelia is the one to timidly ask this question.

"She will be ready to make dialogues with the agents of Ceiphied soon, I wager," Luna mutters, stroking her chin. "Yes. This will be an exciting new age, whatever happens."

"I think you are correct, Dame Inverse," Xellos nods. "I believe, if I may entertain a metaphor, that the high noon battle has been fought, that twilight has come, and it's time to turn out all the lights, and rest."

"Not the night light." Val, suddenly awake, yawns, stretches, and climbs over his mom's arms, into his dad's. He smiles, burrowing down.

Filia looks like she might explode into a thousand little maternal rainbows at any instant.

"You think so, Siddhartha?" Xellos smirks at his persistent little companion, hoisting Val higher so that the child can flop against his chest.

All eyes are on this child. This remarkable child, with the power to enhance an infamous monster's reluctance to assist in world destruction. This amazing child.

"Whozat?" This child, Val, yawns. His fingers trace the place on Xellos's chest where he knows, under Xellos's shirt, there is a brand of eternal loyalty, to himself and his mother. Then his hand falls still against that spot.

Xellos chuckles. "Sorry, o great master Valteira, would you prefer Shakyamuni? Or perhaps just Buddha?"

Val giggles. "I don't get it."

"It means you are a visionary, Valteira," Milgasia gently explains. "It means you are an agent of good change. I would have to agree with your father." He exchanges a meaningful glance with Xellos.

Xellos winks at him. "My thanks, Supreme Elder. Heh."

"Oh." Val yawns again.

"Your dad's a weird guy," Lina snickers.

"Nuh uh." Val seizes a lock of Xellos's hair almost viciously.

"Ow, heh." Xellos cocks an eyebrow as his head is yanked down and to the side.

"My dad," the child retorts insistently, "is a _perfect_ dad."

There is only a moment of awed silence before the entire table erupts in a loud "AWWW." Lina grins and clasps her hands together teasingly, Amelia makes the same gesture sincerely, Gourry sends Xellos a thumbs-up, and Zelgadiss rolls his eyes and smiles.

"Here's to a new era!" Luna crows, clinking beer mugs with the company.

"CHEERS!" everyone shouts.

Xellos turns the hue of a tomato. "Damn it," he mutters. But he's grinning so broadly that he resembles the Cheshire Cat. "My child, you are evil."

Val tugs on the hair, as if to assert his powers over his dad. "I AM your son, Xel." Now his little black tail join's Filia's golden tail around the arm of one of the most powerful monsters in their world.

"Insanely logical, too," Xellos cackles. "Good point, little Buddha. I think you win again."

"Of course I win. Coz I have you and mom. Oranges."

"Always," his parents say together. Again, they grin at each other. Again, they kiss, while the rest of the company continue to toast and drink various good things.

"Here's to your life, Val," Xellos breathes his own new toast, with that ancient and knowing and mysterious smile, when their lips pull apart.

He touches a hand to the top of his son's head.

Valteira is already asleep, dreaming only sweet dreams for the first time since his rebirth, with the sunlight that is his mom and the night light that is his dad forever watching over him.


End file.
